Centroy Blog Testing Internet Explorer on a Mac. It's actually quite easy

Testing Internet Explorer on a Mac. It's actually quite easyAt Centroy we use Macs as our weapon of choice. When we need to test something in our Linux development, we simply fire up a Vmware Fusion. But what about testing Windows in a Mac environment? That's tricky question, but it has an easy answer. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but that's my opinion, and I realize there's a big audience using IE and Windows. Centroy is a web-based application for online team collaboration, which means we need to work same across all browsers. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari. Great! These are almost always comptable. But then there's Internet Explorer, which isn't even compatible with itself. IE8 vs IE9 vs IE10. Yikes... There lies the problem. Part of me wants to say "just use a real browser". But that's an arrogant approach. The reality is that Internet Explorer market share is still meaningful with Microsoft's full muscle behind it. So we need to support Internet Explorer with Macs... As it turns out testing IE in a Mac environment is used to be real pain. All other browsers are simple downloads that work and ready to test Centroy. The problem is: IE won't run on a Mac! Hmm Apple's Safari works on Windows. the irony doesn't go unnoticed. Anyways, I thought about buying a few Windows laptops, but then everyone would be waiting to test things. Nope. I could buy some windows* licenses. Just to test Internet explorer e10? NOPE! I want to test IE right from my Mac. Besides, I really don't want to buy anything Microsoft. If you're reading this, I'm sure you share my seniment. And so you're also wondering how to test IE on a Mac. Turns out this is quite simple to do. All you need is a virtualization app like VMware Fusion or Oracle's Virtual Box. VMware costs $99 per license, while VirtualBox is free. I personally think paying for Fusion is worth it. It's much more stable with Linux and Windows and VMtools emulates the OS environments with solid confidence. VirtualBox is good, plus it's free and free is very good. I'll cover both. Next, you'll also need a developer VM copy of Windows. Here, go to one of Microsoft's sites (best kept secret) to download a developer copy of Windows8 for free The files you download will depend on whether you're using Fusion or VirtualBox. The process is quite similar after downloading the files, so I'll demonstarte with VMware's Fusion in greater detail. VMware Fusion:1. Go to Microsoft's VM appliance website, select Mac as your OS and VMware Fusion for Mac as your virtual machine software. 2. Next, choose your preferred test environment. I'm going with latest Windows8+IE10. Now select cURL and copy the command line. It should look like this: curl -O "http://virtualization.modern.ie/vhd/IEKitV1_Final/VMWare_Fusion/IE10_Win8/IE10.Win8.For.MacVMware.part{1.sfx,2.rar,3.rar}" 3. Next, open up your Mac terminal, paste in that command line. Hit enter. What this is doing is downloading a sfx file and some associated rar files. Don't worry about the files. They'll self extract into a VM we can use later. Downloading will take a while. Total file sizes were about 2GBs. just to use IE on a Mac... Geez. I downloaded from a coffee shop and it took about 27 minutes. No problem. 4. Now we want to give the sfx file permission to execute. Find the name of the sfx file and open your Mac terminal again and type: chmod +x FILENAME.sfxReplace FILENAME with... your actual sfx filename. If you're using the same Windows8 with E10 environment as I am, just copy and paste this into your terminal: chmod +x IE10.Win8.For.MacVMware.part1.sfx BTW: you can grab IE9/8/7/6 once you have Windows8 installed, so don't feel like you're locked in at this step. Windows8+e10 is good choice.5. Next we want to execute the spx file into a virtual machine file we can use. Again, open up the terminal and type: ./FILENAME.sfx or just copy/paste this: ./IE10.Win8.For.MacVMware.part1.sfx This will take a couple minutes. When it's done your terminal output should look something like this: 6. Now we're going to add our fresh new vmdk file in Fusion and launch Windows8. Woohoo! First open up Fusion and click "Add" in the upper right corner, and select "New"7. Select "Continue without a disk"8. Next, select the radio button "Use an existing virtual disk"9. Now select your vm file from your local directory, and select "make a separate copy of your virtual disk". You don't have to create a whole new copy, but I like to do this just in case something get corrupted with whatever I'm testing. I can always go back and boot off the initial install. Next, select the vmdk file for use with VMware Fusion.10. If you're using the newest version of Fusion, you might be asked if you want to convert the VM to a newer version. I chose not to. I don't want to change the state of VM that Microsoft originally created.11. Next select the proper Windows operating system you want the VM to run. I downloaded the Windows8 files, so obviously I'm choosing Windows8.12. The final step gives you the option to change your VM name (in case you have a lot of these). I left the default name "Windows 8", and clicked finish.13. Now go grab a beer. It will take about 5 minutes to copy a new VM file. After that's complete, make sure you have enough RAM provisioned for Windows to run well. I like 2GB for solid testing of IE10, but you can probably get away with 1GB.14. Now launch Windows8 and start surfing IE10. Awesome! The initial boot will take a few minutes to load all the drivers. etcOf course there's a caveat. Because you didn't pay a thing for this dev copy of Windows, Microsoft will annoy you by expiring full run time in 90 days. After 90 days, Windows will shut down after each 1 hour of use, and you'll have to restart the VM. It's a minor annoyance, and one you can get around by running a snapshot script; but this works fine for us.So there you have it. All that work, just to test IE10 on a Mac. Actually, it wasn't so bad. You can test away in a full-fledged Windows environment and you didn't need to pay Microsoft a thing! If you found this helpful, please link to this blog. Enjoy.Most the steps are similar between VMware Fusion and Oracle VirtualBox. As I mentioned, I prefer Fusion, but VirtualBox is free and behaves reasonably well, so I'll cover the differences in the steps below.Virtual Box:1. First you need to download and install VirtualBox for Mac. Setup is pretty easy on your own.2. Select the right VM files for VirtualBox from Microsoft. See Step 1-3 above - for virtualBox files3. Set permissions and execute .sfx file to run VirtualBox machine. See steps 4-5 above. The .ova file will appear. 4. Unlike Fusion, all you need to do is double-click on the .ova file and VirtualBox will launch the Windows VMSimilar to Fusion, make sure you have enough RAM allocated. I like about 2GBs for heavy use.That's all for VirtualBox. It's a bit simpler to set up, and free, but I prefer Fusion's stability and functionality. You can't go wrong with either one.read more