One very fortunate aspect of being a developer working on a Mac is the ability to run virutalization software (in lieu of a secondary machine) for testing in Windows. You don’t even really need that if you don’t mind rebooting to Windows (via Bootcamp) every time you need to test. :/

Until last weekend, I was running Windows on my laptop, but it’s been giving out on me and I knew it was time for a new machine. I didn’t labor long over whether to buy a PC or switch entirely to a Mac only setup. If you read my recent review of the Macbook Air you already know the outcome. ;) I also grabbed a copy of VMware Fusion so I could begin running Windows and Leopard simultaneously on the iMac.

In my mind it’s still not the ideal solution however, so when a reader (thanks David!) kindly pointed out to me the other day a little app called ies4osx, I was very excited. It allows you to run multiple versions of IE on your Mac without the additional software normally required to run a Windows program. Excellent!

Except for one thing. It doesn’t work reliably. At least not yet, and not for me. I installed IE6 and 7 Beta, which is the only version of 7 being offered in the bundle at this time. IE6 seemed to work beautifully. That’s not to say it’s a beautiful UI… it’s got the same lackluster appearance as older versions of Windows, but who cares – it’s not about pretty icons. :)

Version 7 did not want to work at all. In fact, it locked up entirely before I could even think about typing in a URL. There are some obvious bugs (in either ies4osx or perhaps Darwine, the app’s dependency program) because although separate icons are created on your desktop upon install, they are both titled IE 6.0 once launched.

There’s also some debate (see the comments section of Derek Punsalan’s own review of this app) over whether the latest version of Darwine (0.9.55) is the issue. I tried reverting back to v0.9.51 (before supposed bugs were introduced), but it didn’t solve the problem by any real measure. For example, 7.0 doesn’t lock up now, but it takes SEVERAL MINUTES to load a page. For a while I thought it was 1992 again and I was back on dial-up! Who has time to wait 4-5 minutes to see how ONE change will look in ONE browser?

All that said, ies4osx is still worth adding to your toolset, at least for IE6 testing, and especially if you’re not already running VMware or Parallels. Looks like the project is only a one-man show right now and one guy can only do so much… but this application has a lot of promise. Props to the developer for even thinking up something so cool! If Mike can address the 7.0 bugs (I sure hope he will), this would be a killer tool for Mac devs. :)