Question

I want to test the web pages I create in all the modern versions of Internet Explorer (6, 7 and 8 beta) but I work mainly on a Mac and often don’t have direct access to a PC.

Answer 1

Update: Microsoft now provide virtual machine images for various versions of IE that are ready to use on all of the major OS X virtualisation platforms (VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, and Parallels).

Download the appropriate image from: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/

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On an Intel based Mac you can run Windows within a virtual machine. You will need one virtual machine for each version of IE you want to test against.

The instructions below include free and legal virtualisation software and Windows disk images.

1. Download some virtual machine software. The developer disk images we’re going to use are will work with either VMWare Fusion or Sun Virtual Box. VMWare has more features but costs $80, Virtual Box on the other hand is more basic but is free for most users (see Virtual Box licensing FAQ for details).
2. Download the IE developer disk images, which are free from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/…
3. Extract the disk images using cabextract which is available from MacPorts or as source code (Thanks to Clinton).
4. Download Q.app from http://www.kju-app.org/ and put it in your /Applications folder (you will need it to convert the disk images into a format VMWare/Virtual Box can use)

At this point, the process depends on which VM software you’re using.

Virtual Box users

1. Open a Terminal.app on your Mac (you can find it in /Applications/Utilities) and run the following sequence of commands, replacing input.vhd with the name of the VHD file you’re starting from and output.vdi with the name you want your final disk image to have:

   /Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert -O raw -f vpc 'input.vhd' temp.bin VBoxManage convertdd temp.bin 'output.vdi' rm temp.bin mv 'output.vdi' ~/Library/VirtualBox/VDI/ VBoxManage modifyvdi 'output.vdi' compact 

2. Start Virtual Box and create a new virtual machine
3. Select the new VDI file you’ve just created as the boot hard disk

VMWare fusion users

1. Open a Terminal.app on your Mac (you can find it in /Applications/Utilities) and run the following commands, replacing input.vhd and output.vmdk with the name of the VHD file you’re working on and the name you want your resulting disk image to have:

   /Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert -O vmdk -f vpc 'input.vhd' 'output.vmdk' mv 'output.vmdk' ~/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/ 

   This will probably take a while (It takes around 30 minutes per disk image on my 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook w/ 2Gb RAM).

2. Start VMWare Fusion and create a new virtual machine
3. In the advanced disk options select ‘use and existing disk’ and find the VMDK file you just created