MAMP, Macs, VMware Fusion and previewing sites on IE?

Hopefully this title makes sense...

After a hiatus from MODx (doing static sites) I am back working with MODx. I have a good thing going on my Mac Pro with MAMP. Installing and working with MODx works well.

I would like to do two things...

I recently reintalled VMWare Fusion and Windows XP on my Mac Pro.

The default browser is IE6 which I use for testing the abomination that is IE6. I would like to add IE7 without losing IE6 though. What is the latest thought on running mulitple versions of IE on the same virtual machine like this?

I did some searching but it sounds like there are some bugs and outdated info in this arena.

Also, I would like to boot into Windows XP via my copy of VMWare Fusion and access my local MODx installs that I have running on my Mac side using MAMP. I think this is possible? Probably a bunch of permission settings with VMWare Fusion and Windows XP?

I bet some smart developers who have given up running Windows machines have figured this out. Can you tell me how to do this?

Thanks!

Max

I’m skeptical about doing it on the same VM. I tried it on a PC a while back and, though it appeared to work, one or the other browser would misidentify itself to web servers (making the wrong IE conditional comments work). I’m just speculating, but I think IE6 and IE7 look at the same registry value to find out what their version is. So, you’re running IE6 but it thinks it’s IE7 or vice versa, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Someone may have found a workaround for this by now, but it would bother me not to be confident that it really works.

Doing them on separate virtual machines would almost certainly work fine if you have the memory for it.

I had the same problems as bobray. Ive since started using ietester with VM and it works great for browser testing.

http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

Also using IEtester and it works great, I’d advise to use it !

hi

I am using XP on Q with multipleIE from tredosoft witch works very nice. (except Q is a bit slow)

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

next time i’d probably go with http://www.virtualbox.org but i don’t want to install xp again
has anyone tried virtualbox ?

you could try ies4osx which is using x11 and wine. though it has problems with background-images.
http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/

i’d suggest multipleIE.

cheers eni

The VMware Team told me that if you install a clean VM of XP etc. With hte default IE6 installed then take a snapshot of the VM, then install IE7 and take another snapshot of the VM and upgrade to IE8 Beta and take yet another snapshot you can have 3 discrete versions of IE.

That being said I am now using IETester too.

I tried ies4osx and it didnt really work.

This put me off ietester:

Known problems and limitations :

When resizing, the content may disappear. I am working to correct it on the next version.
The Previous/Next buttons are not working properly
Focus is not working properly
Java applets are not working
Flash is not working on IE6 instance.

I’ve got an old laptop with IE6 and XP on it that I use for testing. It’s nice to be able to see the IE6/IE7 versions side-by-side sometimes.

I think the VMWare solution is by far the most reliable then. I even talked to them about an advanced option to suggest taking snapshots on installation of XP or Vista.

I tried ies4osx and never really got it to work. Seemed very buggy and the menus would disappear...