IES4OSX – Run Internet Explorer on Your Mac

May 14, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Software & Scripts 5 Comments

Internet Explorer, a.k.a. the Web Designer’s Plague, unfortunately, isn’t available on the Mac. Many will say this is a good thing, but for designers, or anyone who makes many changes to their template, Internet Explorer is pretty much mandatory for testing. So many people use IE that you can’t afford to have too many major bugs in the behemoth browser.

There aren’t many options for the large amount of Mac-using designers. To test a site in IE, your choices are pretty much limited to either using a PC, or using a virtual PC setup, like VMWare Fusion. If you have a PC on hand, good for you, you’re covered. Otherwise, you’d probably go for VMWare fusion, which costs $80 plus a $189 Windowss XP license. (Or you could just get the WinXP license and use the BootCamp software Apple provides with OS X 10.5) Rather pricey, though, isn’t it?

Luckily, there’s another option out there, albeit a buggy and hacked-together option. It costs $0.00 though, so who cares if it’s a little buggy?

IES4OSX allows you to run several different versions of Internet Explorer on your Mac, for testing designs, or using sites that refuse to work in your preferred browser. It’s a little buggy, it relies on X11, and it takes up a bit of CPU power. But it seems to render pages correctly the same as IE does.

So if you’re not using a Mac yet, here’s another reason to switch… :D

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  • MacDaddy

    Too bad it requires an Intel Processor to run. More proof that I wasted money on my Mac. Why would a web designer be using a Mac anyways??? I continue to kick myself.

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    @MacDaddy, You were a little early buying a Mac, I guess (the Intel move was a great play on Apple’s part). I bought my MacBook recently, and in no way have I regretted it. I generally IE test on another Windows machine (I haven’t wanted to drop more money on a copy of Windows yet). The only real downside of designing on a Mac is the lack of IE. If you don’t have an Intel Mac, there’s always http://browsershots.org/. Not the best solution, but it works if you don’t have access to a Windows PC.

  • reda mager

    thanks

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