Microsoft is committed to moving the Web forward, one way they are planning to do this is by offering free VM, Virtual Machine, of a standalone Windows image with a pre-installed specific version of IE for cross browser testing. Recently, they have extended support for multi-platform’s multi-virtual machine environment.
Cross OS Cross VM Environment Support
If you head to modern.ie’s virtualization section. You will see now there are versions that support for PC, Mac and Linux. Not only does it support cross platforms, but also offers cross VM environments for each OS. For instance, if you are on Mac, you can pick and choose the VM to run on VirtualBox, VMware Fusion or Parallels. This is fantastic to test your web app on any computer ( apart from Chrome Book ).
Each OS and VM apps you choose to run has it’s own installation instructions. For a detailed installation instructions, head to here for complete coverage.
Here are a list of free Virtual Machine with IE versions you can download and install for each OS.
For PC, you have support in:
- Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
- Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 & Windows 8 Pro w/Hyper-V
- Virtual PC for Windows 7
- VirtualBox
- VMWare Player
For Mac:
- VirtualBox
- VMWare Fusion
- Parallels
For Linux
- VirtualBox
Also note, each VM is essentially a Windows OS. You can use it for not only doing cross browser testing, but many other destructive experiments you’d like to do but don’t want to do it on your existing work machine. Take advantage of the free VM and use them wisely.