Yesterday we updated somewhere around 90 VMs for modern.IE. This has been incredibly well received by most people but there was a little bit of "snark" that 90ish VMs was too many. But let’s break that down actually.
The reality is that we’ve got 9 client OS/browser combinations.
- Windows XP and IE6 (which A: goes out of support shortly and B: is less than 1% pretty much everywhere except China – http://www.modern.ie/ie6countdown – but for the 5 people that care, we’ve got a VM for you)
- Windows XP and IE8 (remember XP goes out of support in a few months)
- Windows Vista and IE7 (IE7 is still big in enterprises)
- Windows 7 and IE8
- Windows 7 and IE9
- Windows 7 and IE10
- Windows 7 and IE11
- Windows 8 and IE10
- Windows 8.1 and IE11
That’s a little more manageable and remember that two of those will drop off (theoretically) in just a few months.
How we get to 90ish is that then we cover virtual machines that run on 3 different OSes across all of the major virtualization platforms.
- Mac and Virtual Box
- Mac and VMWare
- Mac an Parallels
- Windows and HyperV on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
- Windows and HyperV on Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 Pro
- Windows 7 and Virtual PC
- Windows 7 and Virtual PC
- Windows and Virtual PC
- Windows and VirtualBox
- Windows and VMWare
- Linux and VirtualBox
There’s a bunch of host OS/Virtualization platform combinations. If you multiple the guest OS/browser combinations and the host OS/virtualization platform combinations, you end up with a LOT of VMs but the reality is that you will only ever need to download a small handful of these at any given point in time.
The really good news, however, is that all of these options are free on the modern.IE Virtual Machines page when you need them.