10 ms·
Test versions of IE from 6 through 11 and Microsoft Edge using virtual machines
- nkuttler 11y agoAnd https://github.com/xdissent/ievms https://github.com/xdissent/ievms for a hassle-free installation.
- therealmarv 11y agoyes, this is a cool project. But unfortunately it is not using the latest images of all IEs and Edge is also not included yet although there is an issue for that https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/issues/263 https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/issues/263 . The maintainer does not update it regularly... last update last year. Also not compatible with VirtualBox 5.0.x. It screams for a fork ;)
- the-dude 11y agoIE has fallen below 5% on the sites I monitor. Why bother?
- wunki 11y agoA lot of businesses are still forcing its employees to use IE.
- melling 11y agoThey'll change when it becomes a big enough problem. That's how business works. Don't encourage them by supporting old IE's.
- 9point6 11y agoFor a lot of business owners using an old version of IE, the browser is something to facilitate their bespoke ActiveX application. They probably don't care if their employees can browse less sites. And on the flip side, a lot of those employees are a sizeable chunk of business for other businesses when they browse on their lunch breaks or whatever. So, large sites aren't going to fully drop support for any browser until after the market share has dried up.
- melling 11y agoThat's their problem. They'll install Chrome. Quit making excuses. I've heard it all a thousand times. Stop supporting old browsers today and business will adapt.
- jtheory 11y agoI think you're assuming that the employees in question are permitted to install software freely on their work computers, and/or that the company decision-makers are aware of new sites/services they're denying themselves by their policy. Firstly, the policy is there for a reason -- often something like "we paid a lot in 2003 for this custom software, and if we upgrade browsers we'll have to pay X to have it rewritten/replaced". X may be a rather large sum of money -- easily enough to overwhelm whatever benefits they might get by becoming paying customers of whoever's new venture. There's also a potential for a sort of catch-22; new sites/services may pop up that could even replace their old custom-built software... but if they can't even try it out and the site looks awful on their browsers, a) it's less likely they'll make the jump and b) it gives the impression of being a new-fangled flash-in-the-pan sort of thing. After all, the serious companies online put the effort into supporting older browsers.
- changke 11y agothen dropping IE support is a good way to force them focus on the job instead of surfing on the web. ;-)
- spacecowboy_lon 11y agoSucks if your business's users are corporates and the CEO's PA books her bosses flights/hotels with a competitor
- vetinari 11y agoIf they are really conservative, they surely book flights and hotels by phone, not web.
- pluma 11y agoExcept when your app is meant to be used by them for work and their IT has them stuck on an old version of IE. I know that customer requirements are pretty much unheard of in startup land but other companies have to obey this kind of limitation in order to make any money (which again is an alien concept in startup land -- not every business model survives on growth alone).
- onion2k 11y agoAs with all things, not every user is the same. The raw number of visitors using each browser is rather a useless metric for a lot of sites - you should be looking which browsers convert to sales more, click through adverts more, spend the most time on the website, etc. In my experience IE users are much more likely to complete an interstitial signup form or leave a site via a banner than Chrome or Firefox users. IE may have fewer users, but those users are much more valuable if you're building an ad-supported site. Also, if you're making a substantial site with, say, 10 million MAUs, 5% of them is 500,000 people. That's a lot. Do you really want that number of people telling their friends "The site doesn't work for me"?
- the-dude 11y agoNot every site is about money. My numbers are actually closer to 3% than to 5%. I could not care less.
- onion2k 11y agoIf your point was "Why bother if you're building a site where the IE traffic is of no consequence?" then you should have said that. Obviously there's no point spending time and money writing code that no one benefits from, but that isn't the case for every site. Plenty of sites still need to work in IE because it will affect their income. If someone out there is writing a website whose only customer is an eccentric billionaire who spends $100m a year but insists on using Mosaic 2.0 on a dusty old 286, then they should be testing their updates on Mosaic. Go where your customers are. If you don't have customers, do what you like. Although I'd question whether you even need a website if that's the case.
- the-dude 11y agoI do have customers: about 97% of them. I also provide free services as a gift to my local community ( Groningen ), just to give back. I am not downloading GBs of VMs and spend hours of time to validate IE for a couple of illiterate smugs.
- oliciv 11y agoFor a start, how do you know that the reason for the low usage isn't that they are broken in IE? You could be turning customers away.
- outside1234 11y agoYou forgot the enterprise.
- Encosia 11y agoIf you're looking at overall traffic, combining mobile, tablet, and desktop/laptop, that's probably in the ballpark of correct, but that simplistic measure isn't something I would allow to drive too many decisions. If your site depends at all on user generated content (even comments), one active desktop/laptop user is probably worth hundreds or thousands of screenboard users. On my non-corporate-facing sites, IE is still 30+% of desktop usage, even though it's only 5-10% of overall usage. Also, if you provide an untested experience to your IE users, you're probably bouncing many more users than you realize. Very few people return to a site that doesn't work in their default browser. nb: I'm typing this in Chrome on a MBP.
- jkkrrk 11y agoInteresting. I'm wondering what other things all the VM's could be used for.
- therealmarv 11y agoI also used them for a quick testing of Windows specific things (no Windows here... but this VMs make it easy to make a quick test).
- acqq 11y agoIE6 on Windows XP is 1 GB zipped. Microsoft Edge containing VM is 5 GB zipped. All VMs expire: "Please note that these virtual machines expire after 90 days. We recommend setting a snapshot when you first install the virtual machine which you can roll back to later."
- sleepychu 11y agoThey expire but you can, and they advise you to, snapshot and roll back. The purpose is to stop you just using it as a windows vm for doing work on.
- pluma 11y agoThis is probably obvious but worth noting anyway: remember to do the snapshot before you start the VM. The expiry countdown starts the first time you boot the VM and is date-based so the VM will expire even if you only used it once.
- 0x0 11y agoOn the other hand, having a snapshot in a booted state gets you up and testing much quicker for subsequent runs. Even if it will expire after a while, you'll get one hour of work in before windows shuts down, and then you just restore the snapshot again.
- pluma 11y agoReally? I'm pretty sure at least one of the VMs was completely locked down when booted up after it had expired. Not sure which version of Windows that was, though. That said, what I generally do is to simply suspend the VM instead of resetting it to the snapshot. Then when it expires I can still do a reset to the snapshot to reset the expiry. I generally boot at least the IE8 VM up before using it in order to install basic things like the Flash player (to test the Flash fallback for HTML5 media players).
- 11y ago
- discordance 11y agoAnyone monitoring high volume sites care to share the number of Edge users they are seeing visiting their site? - would be interesting to know the numbers a few weeks after the Win10 launch.
- MattBearman 11y agoMy stats show that this month (Aug 2015) Microsoft Edge is about 0.9% of total, and about 1.2% of Windows
- elros 11y agoSure, here are my 2¢: Aggregated numbers for last week show Edge at 0,01% of the ~12.400.000 sessions. The numbers for yesterday show 0,31% of the ~1.700.000 sessions.
- miyuru 11y agomine is not much popular, but 1.02% edge users this month.
- acdha 11y agoOn a global, general interest site I'm seeing it around ~0.4% currently. One note: Google Analytics makes this harder to search for because they waited until a day or two ago to update their regex; until then Edge users were listed as Chrome 42.0.2311.135.OS on Windows NT.
- zaf 11y agoI've been using this for the last 6 months as part of cross browser testing and it has been a life saver. The alternatives are even a bigger pain in the rear. I have no idea who to thank but thank you.
- reacweb 11y agoIt exists since a couple of years (before the departure of Balmer). You can thank Microsoft.
- me_bx 11y agoAlso worth noting: remote IE [1] can be used to test IE from a remote machine. Would prevent from wasting disk space installing one window VM for each IE version to test... Has anyone tried it? It's not clear from the site which version of IE is available from that service. Too bad they don't have a linux client either :( [1] https://remote.modern.ie/ https://remote.modern.ie/
- narsil 11y agoI've tried it from my Mac. It's far more convenient than a VM. It runs IE 11.
- therealmarv 11y agoit is running Edge... look at the version number closely ;) my experience with it: I have connection loses often with remote IE. It's not so good :(
- jimbobimbo 11y agoIt is NOT running Edge - it is running an "edge version" of IE. http://stackoverflow.com/a/12530777 http://stackoverflow.com/a/12530777
- therealmarv 11y agoyou are wrong. It is THE Edge browser. Test it yourself with http://html5test.com http://html5test.com it reaches point scores which are not reachable for IE11. Also the browser identifies itself to other websites as Chromium browser like the Edge browser.
- steilpass 11y agoyou've made me excited. after 15 minutes fooling around I give up. the download in the mac app store fails with some network issue.
- 11y ago
- spacecowboy_lon 11y agoThey also do VM's for a number of android/windows phones which is useful for testing mobile devices. https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/msft-android-emulator-vs.aspx https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/msft-android-emu... https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/ff402563(v=vs.105).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/ff4025...
- defied 11y agoWe're providing the same IE/Edge versions at http://testingbot.com http://testingbot.com so people can instantly test from their browser with mouse&keyboard, without having to download the VMs
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- KayEss 11y agoI wish they supported kvm for Linux rather than virtualbox.
- espadrine 11y agoDoesn't qemu have image converters?
- hannob 11y agoI've used these images many times with qemu/kvm. No problem, just create a snapshot.
- mkesper 11y agoIt's possible to convert virtualbox images to kvm.
- threedaymonk 11y agoThis lets you run the images under KVM: https://github.com/lentinj/ie-vm https://github.com/lentinj/ie-vm
- escobar 11y agoI've tried Virtual Machines like this before and found that while they work great they're clunky, take up precious space, and I need to test with many versions. I've tested a few paid solutions (Ghostlab, Browserstack, Cross Browser Testing) and so far am sticking with Browserstack. I have absolutely no association with any of these websites, only clients who demand their websites work in archaic versions of Internet Explorer :P I do still use the IE VMs for testing, and I even use a real PC for further testing once the website is "ready". Just lately been preferring to quickly test while developing in my browser without worrying about spinning up a VM or anything.
- SXX 11y agoYou can save a lot of disk space if you'll use backing files. E.g you can have one base Windows disk image that used by any number of VMs configured differently. So you basically only need like 5-15GB for compressed Windows image and then each VM configuration will only take another 1-2GB at most. Personally use it with QEMU / KVM now, but totally sure VMWare had backing files support too.
- matthewmacleod 11y agoI guess the problem there is that you need different Windows versions too – and they're all pretty chunky! It definitely helps though, and AFAIK all virtualisation tools have support.
- SXX 11y agoI believe that Windows 7 would be enough for anything except Edge. E.g you can install IE6 in XP compatability mode for sure. Suppose there may be issues with crap like ActiveX, but most of people I know just worry about how page looks like and I don't believe rendering of IE11 on Win7 and Win8 would be different. Though I'm not expert.
- talmand 11y agoJust curious, how do you install IE6 in Win7?
- bes7ow 11y agoI love these for testing sites and HTML emails in different versions of Outlook. However, activation can be very annoying and lock a VM completely.
- rjsw 11y agoHow much testing of HTML emails do you need ? Just bounce them back to the sender.
- AlikhanPeleg 11y agoIf you don't want to (or cannot) share the page to test with a third party there are client-only solutions like http://www.browseemall.com http://www.browseemall.com which take up less space and are more convenient than full blown VMs.
- benbristow 11y agoWhy does Linux only have VirtualBox machines available? Linux has native support for VMware as well.
- therealmarv 11y agoIn the past they also provided Vagrant boxes. Some people also developed easy Vagrantfiles for them. See here in a official blog post http://blog.syntaxc4.net/post/2014/09/03/windows-boxes-for-vagrant-courtesy-of-modern-ie.aspx http://blog.syntaxc4.net/post/2014/09/03/windows-boxes-for-v... Would be great if they will support Vagrant officially for Edge. Although https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/ https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/ is pretty close but not maintained good (last update last year). This is how I want to spin up IE VMs: vagrant init somwhere/edge vagrant up
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- edpichler 11y agoI havent read about Vagrant yet. Is it similar to docker? Vmware? What is the big deal in Vagrant?
- horb 11y agoIn short, Docker manages containers whereas Vagrant manages virtual machines.
- UserRights 11y agohttp://lmgtfy.com/?q=vagrant http://lmgtfy.com/?q=vagrant
- dang 11y agoPlease don't do this here.
- gcr 11y agoVagrant is just a command line interface to (headless) Virtualbox. That's all. Makes provisioning and SSH logins a snap.
- stephenr 11y ago
- rbanffy 11y agoGuys... This is ancient.
- rocky1138 11y agoBut still valuable. It's also obvious from the comments that a few people here have never seen this before.
- rbanffy 11y agoWhich is quite surprising, I must add. Do we have an easy way to get an account age breakdown by active account age?
- rocky1138 11y agoI don't know and I don't think so. I'm pretty sure HN keeps their cards close to their chest with respect to stats. I hope to be proven wrong, though! It would be neat to peruse.
- stuaxo 11y agoAre there issues with using this to test builds of desktop apps ? I would like to test various Python apps on windows in an automated fashion.
- therealmarv 11y agonot sure if officially/legally allowed (pretty sure not automated) but it's at least possible! :)
- simonbyrne 11y agoThe relevant part of the conditions [1] simply state that > You may use the software for testing purposes only. You may not use the software for commercial purposes. You may not use the software in a live operating environment. So there's nothing inherently wrong with testing desktop apps, but the non-commercial clause may cause problems. [1] http://modernievirt.blob.core.windows.net/vhd/release_notes_license_terms_1_5_15.pdf http://modernievirt.blob.core.windows.net/vhd/release_notes_...
- stuaxo 11y agoCool! I've been testing open source apps in an adhoc fashion with these, but was worried about licensing. I guess I can automate and document this now :)
- UserRights 11y agoIsn't it just bizarre how unbelievably bloated these windows systems are? 5 GB compressed image size, and nothing much usable in there but a broken browser. This site should be renamed to "The Historical Horror Graveyard of Bad Computing Ideas" - go and show your students how operating systems should not work and how the ill-minded hierarchical-company-business-religion destroys creativity and good ideas and harmed human progress for much too long. It is good to know that Windows 10 is the last Windows - may that prophecy fullfill itself quickly.
- nly 11y agoWindows actually got smaller with 10. Windows 7 is like 25 GB fully-updated, Windows 10 only 12 GB.
- userbinator 11y agoI suppose this could have something to do with it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi... (There's no page for 10 yet but more features were removed.)
- zaf 11y agoAmen. Thank the heavens for having choices in far superior computing environments. I'm always shocked at what windows users have had to go through in the last 15 years. I was getting warmed up to windows 10 but the recent privacy issues have got me cold again.
- tenfingers 11y agoNot to mention that if the browser was separate from the OS, as it should be, you could just install all of them side-by-side.
- nness 11y agoI find it amazing that Ubuntu 15.04 is still under 700mb, but I suppose you have to install a lot of packages on first run anyway. I do doubt that it's 5gb worth though...
- acqq 11y agoFrom the installation pdf: "3. NO ACTIVATION. To prevent its unlicensed use, the software contains activation enforcement technology. Because the software is licensed for testing use only, you are not licensed to activate the software for any purpose even if it prompts you to do so."
- nness 11y agoMakes sense to me. You can test absolutely everything without having to activate.
- acqq 11y agoI don't question the possibility to test IE (under the limits they present). The strange (or interesting) part is this "even if it prompts you to do so" not that they don't give you the license. You get the software that tells you something and you're not allowed to click what it tells you. It suggests that the activation software, both client and server side, can't even be adjusted to manage the use cases intended by the release we discuss. What appears to be a software configuration problem (part of which is the 90 day expiration they give) is solved by the license (as in "you are not licensed").
- CHY872 11y agoI suppose that this is a somewhat stripped down version of Windows, and their concern is that either through bugs or through manipulations people could trigger the activation window in some manner. Allowing people to activate Windows in this manner would simply make this software more work for the lawyers.
- nness 11y agoI think part of it is that if they deliberately stifle their own copy-protection, it might make it easier for malware or pirates to learn how they did it and do the same.
- circa 11y agoI haven't tried this yet but where was this 10+ years ago? I feel like its too late for a site like this, but I guess it will still be very useful.
- zwily 11y agoThey've been doing this for at least 5 years now.
- BjornW 11y agoI'm happy that Microsoft provides these VM's and I hope other vendors (Hi Apple!) would provide VM's as well. So we can make sure the web is accessible for anyone regardless the browser they use.
- cptskippy 11y agoThat would totally go against Apple's business model. If Apple provided VMs for developers to test with they would lose 92.76%* of their Enterprise market. * I made that number up.
- pierrec 11y agoWishful thinking. They actually make an effort to make sure OSX is not virtualizable onto other platforms. We recently had a pretty long-winded discussion about this very problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9644773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9644773
- lucianmarin 11y agoThat's not a problem. You can find WebKit powered browsers on any platform. It's the same WebKit used in Safari on OS X and iOS.
- grinnick 11y agoThis is the first time I've seen the .ie TLD (ireland) used in a technical context. It's a cool idea given the Microsoft context.
- frik 11y agoThe latest IE11 update destroyed Win7 ("wininet.dll problem") on my work pc - QA on vacation? So such virtual machine images of IE will come handy.