Just a quick post because I’ve found an amazingly useful application.

As a web developer, I’m constantly plagued by Internet Explorer and it’s non-standard behavior. Granted, IE 8 goes a long way to solve this, but all-too-often the places where I work (still!) use IE 6. This means that I build an app, test it on the “proper” browsers and IE 8 (in an Windows Virtual Machine), then take it to the client and they show me a whole load of rendering errors in IE 6. Windows won’t let you install 2 versions of IE, or downgrade from the one you’ve got, so I’m a bit stuck unless I want to run a seperate VM for each version.

The solution: IETester. This is a brilliant Freeware windows app that lets you open a series of tabs for the various versions of IE (5.5, 6, 7 and 8) to test the rendering and javascript engines side-by-side. It Just Works, and until IE 8 adoption is widespread (read: when people are forced to stop using XP), is a must for all web designers and developers!