This is interesting: today I read on TUAW of ‘ies4osx‘, which allows Intel Mac OSX users to run IE 5, 5.5, 6 and 7 (still beta for some reason?). I’d heard of the ‘ies4linux’ package some time ago, but news hadn’t reached me of a Mac version until today.

This is an absolute boon (not ‘Boon‘) for people like me (i.e. a Mac-based website developer), as the only reason I can recently recall firing up my Windows machine is to do IE website testing.

Even better: I can install multiple versions of IE; superb.

I’m running Leopard (I notice that recent revisions added support for Leopard’s X11 system - if you’re running Tiger, you’ll need to install X11 from the install DVD if you haven’t already) and, after installing all 69Mb of Darwine, I fired up the ies4osx installer. (I’ve downloaded 2_5beta6_4.)

It sits there for quite a while, downloading various .exe (and other) files from undisclosed locations - including, interestingly, a bunch of fonts (arial32.exe, times32.exe - and even the dreaded comic32.exe [the horror]). This sounded promising, as font rendering has been the cause of some of the more subtle cross-platform browser problems I’ve seen.

A few scary messages later (”installing registry keys” - shiver) - and a few promising messages later (installing Flash Player 9), I’m the proud owner of some Internet Explorer links in my Applications folder. (Then the ies4osx installer took up all my CPU - you might want to quit it.)

So, does everything work? Well, for me, IE7 seems un-usably slow. A basic site (no Flash, nothing funny) that loads for me in perhaps 2 seconds in Safari is taking about FIVE MINUTES in IE7. Clearly something is a bit wrong there, but I’m not sure what.

IE6 seems to fare much better, however, yielding sensible “couple of seconds” load times on the site - and it displays the same rendering bug I know IE6 does on Windows! It’s definitely fast enough to be usable. Flash works fine. I do get a few odd rendering bugs if I click the “Search” or “Favorites” button in the toolbar, but nothing show-stopping.

Of course, keyboard shortcuts are from Windows-land, which makes complete sense, but doesn’t mean that I don’t always try Command-V rather than Control-V to paste _every single time_.

Next - and this is possibly the most important thing for me - I need to fire up my Windows machine, and try some comparative screenshots; the killer for me is if this renders just like IE on Windows. If it doesn’t, it’ll be back to the drawing board.

If the screenshots are comparable, and the IE7 problems are resolved (they may be my problem; I’m not sure yet), this could be worth persevering with.

Cheers,

Neil.

P.S. Yes, I know this could be done through a VM like Fusion or Parallels. However, this is free, more lightweight (no multi-gig Windows disk files hanging around), and doesn’t require a Windows license.