Without using Parallels, Crossover or Bootcamp, or even having a Windows Partition! Today we’ll be using Wine to emulate Windows and run all version of Internet Exlorer, which will make for a much lighter overall system footprint. It will also integrate perfectly into OS X.
I get asked this one a lot by web developers so I thought I would throw this up here for posterity. Not everyone wants to taint their Mac by running full blown Windows on it (am I right?), but if you’re a web developer it’s pretty critical that you build pages that render properly in Internet Explorer. If you have done this type of work on *nix you might remember using a great tool named ies4linux. Well you guessed it, ies4osx was recently ported to the Mac by Mike Kronenberg.
Note: This only works on Intel based processors. Sorry PPC users.
- Tiger users will need to install X11 on their Macs. Leopard comes with X11 pre-installed so carry on to step 2 if you are running OS X 10.5.x.
- Download and open Darwin 0.9.49_2.
- Copy Darwin to your Applications folder.
- Download and install ies4osx.
- Choose your browser and language and click the play button. If you click the log icon you will see ies4osx is downloading all of the needed components for the browsers. Depending on your connection this may take a while, so grab a soda or something.
- In your Applications folder you should now see the available browsers. Ahhh web developer bliss.
The browsers will install the components necessary to run Flash, and everything should work nearly identically as it would under Windows, except the system fonts will be pulled from your Mac. Most importantly IE will render as it would under Windows. In my case I have been hacking CSS bugs via this method for a few weeks, and I can say it is a great deal better for me than attempting to do this under Parallels or another virtual machine. Another bonus is that an X11 virtual machine running IE uses only about 25mb of system memory on my system, a heckuva lot less than any other solution.
Oh and as far as I know you can’t do this under Windows quite nearly as easily as this – which I suppose is more than a little ironic.
ies4osx is free and licensed under the GPL. Be sure to check out Mike’s blog for updates.