This probably isn't news to many of you, but I am one of those that actively avoids Internet Explorer as a browser. In fact it's fair to say that 99% of my usage of IE comes either from testing for cross-browser support or connecting remotely to the servers at work (considering that the education field is so Mac-friendly, it's somewhat ironic that ED itself has practically no support for Macs).

That being said, I am a very vocal advocate of cross-browser support for all major browsers. Based on the logs for the sites I host and at work, that means supporting IE7 and IE8, which account for about 60% of the traffic on average combined. Thankfully IE6 is down to less than 5% overall usage, so it's off my radar unless explicitly asked for (thank God!). But IE9 has started to catch on since it's release, with about the same usage rate as IE6 but trending upwards.

Knowing that I will be needing to support IE9 going forward for my own work (and guessing that a mandate to support it is not too far off at my day job), I recently upgraded my VM from WinXP to Win7, and installed IE9 on it. I then was going to install the IE Collections software package to get all the IE browsers I needed, as I did on WinXP, when I learned that this was no longer needed for me.

IE9 has a Developer Toolbar like Firefox and Chrome, accessed by the F12 key. On it is the option to choose what version of IE to render the page in. You can choose IE7, IE8, or IE9. No more third party software for this task!

As much as it pains me to say this, Microsoft actually got something right with this one.

For those not on IE9, I would recommend giving the IE Collections site a look. It's a hack for them to be able to have multiple versions of IE on one machine, but it always worked for me.

This entry was posted on June 2, 2011 at 10:55 AM and has received 1252 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.