marketplex.net

Most web developers know that Internet Explorer sucks and those that don’t just aren’t paying attention. IE8 sucks slightly less than IE7 which sucked a fraction less than the truly appalling IE6 and with IE9 on the way there’s a chance by this time next year Microsoft will have finally reached the starting gate for web standards – a place other vendors passed years ago.

Internet Explorer is a classic demonstration of why monopoly is a bad thing. Without genuine competition companies like Microsoft can get away with pushing junk to a captive audience. It is only since quality browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera started eroding then obliterating IE’s market share that Microsoft has conceded it might be a good idea if they listened to rather than dictated to the customer.

In the near future web developers (fingers crossed) will finally be able to design once in the knowledge their code will be compatible with all the browser choices out there. Of course we have the mobile market to consider which is a whole different ball game. But let’s just hope the painful lessons of the past have been learned and this new medium is rolled neatly into place. Utopia beckons. Well it will seem like utopia by comparison to what has gone before.

The main trouble developers face now is the number of legacy IE installations out there, especially in the corporate world. IE6 still has a frighteningly high user base, dwindling fast but still significant because it was so dominant.

Add in the folks who managed to make it to IE7 but, inexplicably, have missed out on IE8 and you are left with three distinct versions of non-standards compliant browsers to account for. What makes it even worse, these version of IE aren’t even compatible with each other and you can’t reliably install them on the same computer so you can test your web site.

Despite the surge in competition, Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser so ensuring your sites are compatible with it (and all its active versions) is a necessary task and a major headache.

You could install three machines running the different IE versions and test locally, I guess. Or there are a few online services available that will load your site and return a screen shot. This is okay for testing visual output but tells you nothing about interactivity.

Paid services exist that allow you to remotely connect to servers running installations of most of the active browser brands and versions. I’ve never used these myself because having to pay for Microsoft’s mistakes is something I won’t do.

Which is why I was delighted when I stumbled upon a free resource that is simply superb. Have a look at this: Spoon.net Browser Sandbox

This is a free virtual service that allows you to fire up a remote copy of any of the major browsers and run it just as if it were installed on your local machine. All you have to do is download the Spoon Plugin and you’re good to go.

It actually works and works very well. I downloaded the plugin, it downloaded fine but didn’t give any confirmation message when complete which prompted me to think, of course, “There is no Spoon!” But it runs silently in the background and then all you do is visit their site, click on the application you want to run and within a few seconds you have the app running on your desktop. This is not some hobbled version, it’s the real deal so go ahead and test as if you’d just installed from CD.

Great stuff, browser cross compatibility testing SOLVED! This changes the game.

There’s a whole bunch of other stuff you can load up also, including the GIMP, a version of Navicat (try it if you are bored with MySQLAdmin), games, utilities, tons of stuff.

I’ve no idea how long this service has been running but I just found it and I’m chuffed to bits. Check it out for yourself, you’ll be impressed.