What would be the ultimate web application browser compatibility test machine be? The testing environment would be (XP: IE6,FF3.6), (XP: IE7,Chrome), (XP: IE8,Safari), (MacOsX: Safari, FF3.6, Chrome), (Ubuntu: FF3.6, Chrome)
Of course I want it all in one machine, my initial thought was Using a MacOsX as a host machine and use virtual box to install 3 xp and one ubuntu on it.
Do you think it is an optimal solution? Do you have any better solution to achieve the above?
Update:
This testing machine will be in a network. I also need these three functionality out of my VM:
-
Need to be able to VNC via
network to the testing machine. -
All VM instances need to be
able to access to the local network. -
Somehow, I need to be able to
test using third party Internet
provider (To test network caching
and proxies)
I use Mac OS X and 64-bit VMWare Fusion, and I typically run Mac plus Ubuntu plus 3 flavors of Windows (XP with IE6, Vista with IE7 and Win 7 with IE 8) I used to have 9, one flavor OS per IE level, but that got to be too much maintenance, so I pared it down. I found if a browser had problems it was typically not OS-related, or at least not often enough to make me care.