I have been using IETester for a little while now and although I have read that sometimes it can be buggy and not completely accurate (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5612170/web-testing-for-ie-how-accurate-is-ietester) when I emulate IE6 it always seems to render the box model correctly (which IE6 obviously wouldn’t). I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem. The Developer Tools on IE8 and 9 do emulate the box model incorrectly for IE6 mode like it should, but I find that they are inconsistent with IETester too. I find myself constantly switching between IE developer tools and IETester trying to guess at what IE6 would really display.
Should I only be using one or the other, or perhaps a different tool altogether?
I would greatly appreciate any insight on this.
I believe IE8 and IE9 don’t even have an IE6 emulation mode (only IE7, I thought). But the best way to test for IE6, is to get a virtual machine up and running with IE6 installed. You could use IETester or one of the various stand-alone versions of IE6 to test it on your development PC (most things will work as expected, after all), and do a final test on the virtual machine.
To my knowledge there are no other tools that emulate every quirk of IE6 better.