Create Sean: Journey to Professional Designer

IE Tester is a great tool for the web developer.

IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 2, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.
New in v0.2.3 : IE8 beta 2 and Print feature !

This is an alpha release, so feel free to post comments/bugs on the IETester forum or contact me directly.
Minimum requirement : Windows Vista or Windows XP with IE7 (Windows XP with IE6 has some minor problems and IE7/IE8 instances do not work under this config)

A couple of features that I would like to see added are the use of a developer toolbar. I checked the forums and it looks like the target is for this to happen in first quarter 2009.

The second feature I would like is tab context menu to open in new tab of whichever IE version you like and/or open in all versions (new tabs). As it stands, you have to manually open a new tab and type in (or paste) the url that you want to look at.

IE Tester is not perfect but as it’s still in alpha, that’s to be expected. I’ve never really liked browswershots or other cam based testing sites as you couldn’t check things real time as you make changes. Now I can do this. IE Tester has now been added to my standard tools along with firebug and the IE developer toolbar. Below is a quick look at what I saw earlier.

I loaded up this blog in IE tester in four different tabs - one each for IE 5.5, 6, 7, 8 beta 2. It was nice to see that my blog looks the same in IE 7 & 8b2.

IE 8 beta 2

IE 7

Things get interesting in IE 6 where the sidebar drops out of view and the design isn’t centered on the page. I wasn’t aware of this since I don’t have access to IE 6 anywhere. Also looking on the portfolio site, some things are a little wacked. I was already planning a redesign of that site and when I get to work on it, I’ll be sure to pay attention to IE 6 there. For this blog I’m not concerned.

IE 6

IE 5.5 does a much better job of rendering than IE6. Everything looks fine except the page isn’t centered, but that’s something I can live with. Just as with IE6 the png images have no transparency, but again for this site, I consider that a non-issue.

IE 5.5