I’m a Program Manager on the Developer Relations team for Internet Explorer. The core mission of my team is to help developers write interoperable web sites across all of the major browsers. To that end, we have put together a set of tools and downloads that will help you testing, especially for Internet Explorer but most of the tools help across app browsers.
modern.IE Scanner
The modern.IE Scanner is does a static scan of your web site looking for common issues on web sites. Currently, it looks for:
Fix common problems from supporting old versions of IE
Known compatibility issues
Compatibility Mode
Frameworks & libraries
Web standards docmode
Fix common problems from supporting old versions of IE
CSS prefixes
Browser plug-ins
Responsive web design
Suggested enhancement
Browser detection
Optimize the images on your page
HTML5 inputs
Suggested enhancement
Prerender + prefetch
Suggested enhancement
Compressed content
Consider building with some new features in Windows 8
Touch-first browsing
Flip Ahead Browsing
IE11 tiles + Notifications
Once you’ve scanned your site and reviewed the static results, you can take a look at how your site looks across a lot of browsers with the screen shot service by Browser Stack and also do a scan for code that’s no longer supported by current versions of Internet Explorer.
It will save you a bunch of time testing and looking for issues to scan your web site with the modern.IE Scanner.
Virtual Machine Downloads
The scanner is great but there’s nothing like looking at the real thing. To help here, the team has put up a large set of virtual machines to help you out here. These virtual machines are designed for you to do Internet Explorer testing.
We have virtual machines for folks running Windows, OSX and Linux across the following virtualization platforms (dependent on base platform):
Hyper-V (Windows)
Virtual PC (Windows)
Virtual Box (Windows, OSX and Linux
VMWare (Windows, OSX)
Parallels (OSX)
The virtual machines include a lot of different Windows OS and browser configurations.
Windows XP with IE6
Windows XP with IE8
Windows Vista with IE7
Windows 7 with IE8
Windows 7 with IE9
Windows 7 with IE10
Windows 7 with IE11 (Currently RP but soon to be release)
Windows 8 with IE10
Windows 8.1 and IE11 (Currently preview but soon to be release)
This is a lot of machines. If you count up all the variations of virtualization platform, OS and browser, it’s a little over 90 VMs that we’ve got for you to download.
These are 90 day VMs because they are not activated VMs. This means that in 90 days, you’ll need to come back and download a new one but that’s a good thing because we’ll be keeping them up to date with security patches and the like on the web site so you don’t have to think about it.
Offers
There are also partner offers that we give from time to time ranging from some percentage off of Parallels to a 3 month trial of Browser Stack (rather than their normal 1 month trial) and so on. These change from time to time so I’m not going to go through all of these here.
Summary
There’s a ton that the team is doing which is all aimed at helping web developers build an interoperable web. What I hope never happens again is a “Best viewed in X Browser” tag on a web site again.