Displaying your website in Internet Explorer on a Mac

As a mac user, I can’t install Internet Explorer on my system. And since I am a web developer, I want to view my websites in Internet Explorer for sake of testing. Luckily, there are some ways you can get around this. And in this article I will tell you!

Option 1: Screenshots from your website

If you only need some screenshots from your website displayed in Internet Explorer (and other browsers) then you can best use one of the following websites that provide screenshots of your website.

• Browsershots, this website is great for screenshots of a long list of browsers on different operating systems. It works very simple, just enter your URL, select the operating systems and browsers you want, and click the Send button. The only con is that it can take up to an hour before all your screenshots are taken and send to your computer.
• Adobe Browserlab, this one is more consistent. After logging in with your Adobe ID (or after registering, if you haven’t already) you can view your website in approximately 10 browsers. Compared to browsershots there aren’t many browsers. But your website is loaded in a few seconds, and the screenshots are more consistent, as I said before.

If you would ask me, I would stick with Adobe Browserlab, because it’s quick, and consistent. But what if you have like moving elements on your website or some javascript elements you definitely have to test in IE. Then you’re not satisfied with only a few screenshots. As far as I know there are two options you can choose from to achieve this. Let’s take a look at them.

Option 2: Testing your website in IE on your Mac

But what if you really need to test your website in Internet Explorer, because there are moving elements for example. Or you want to test if some transitions are working. What I suggest you to do then is download an application that can handle a virtual machine. Based on the budget you have you can choose VMWare Fusion 4, which costs fifty bucks. There is also a good free program called VirtualBox. Both work on Mac and on Windows as well. If you have installed that you can install Windows on it (of course you need to buy that first). And finally you have two options for testing in Internet Explorer. Either you can install IE Collection, with that application you can run practically all versions of Internet Explorer, from version 1 to 9, but I suggest you to only install 6 and up, since versions below 6 are almost never used anymore.

Another option would be installing an application called IETester, with this application you could simply run versions of Internet Explorer side by side. Versions 5.5 and up are supported. I go with this application, because then I wouldn’t have 4 versions of IE on my virtual machine.

That’s it

Hopefully I helped you out if you needed Internet Explorer on your Mac. Thanks for reading and if you have any questions or anything else, tell me in the comments.