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Comment by escobar | Hacker News Reader

I've tried Virtual Machines like this before and found that while they work great they're clunky, take up precious space, and I need to test with many versions. I've tested a few paid solutions (Ghostlab, Browserstack, Cross Browser Testing) and so far am sticking with Browserstack. I have absolutely no association with any of these websites, only clients who demand their websites work in archaic versions of Internet Explorer :P

I do still use the IE VMs for testing, and I even use a real PC for further testing once the website is "ready". Just lately been preferring to quickly test while developing in my browser without worrying about spinning up a VM or anything.

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You can save a lot of disk space if you'll use backing files. E.g you can have one base Windows disk image that used by any number of VMs configured differently. So you basically only need like 5-15GB for compressed Windows image and then each VM configuration will only take another 1-2GB at most.

Personally use it with QEMU / KVM now, but totally sure VMWare had backing files support too.

I guess the problem there is that you need different Windows versions too – and they're all pretty chunky! It definitely helps though, and AFAIK all virtualisation tools have support.

I believe that Windows 7 would be enough for anything except Edge. E.g you can install IE6 in XP compatability mode for sure.

Suppose there may be issues with crap like ActiveX, but most of people I know just worry about how page looks like and I don't believe rendering of IE11 on Win7 and Win8 would be different. Though I'm not expert.

Just curious, how do you install IE6 in Win7?

By using the "XP Mode" VM.

So, that is not installing IE6 in Win7. That's installing IE6 in WinXP that's running as a VM in Win7.

Gee, I just recently hated upon Qemu/KVM for not having the equivalent of Hyper-V differencing disks! Great to know this exists as this will save me quite a bit of disk space on my CentOS VMs.

VMware supports "parent" vmdk files. The leaf-node "child" vmdk will diff based on the ancestors. VMware Player does support this. The VMware implementation of XPMode uses it. You can use vdiskmanager to convert the root vmdk to sparse files, which leaves the main vmdk file with just the configuration in it. This makes it much easier to set up the parent-child relationship than monolithic vmdk.

I've have the opposite opinion. I have found that space is a premium, even if I'm using 20gb for my VM's that's still a small portion of my Mac's SSD.

The biggest issue we had with Browserstack (and the like) was that it required us to tunnel through our proxy. Whilst I appreciate this simplifies testing localhosts, it made us all a bit nervous. Not to mention Browserstack's recent breach.

A VM is a small price to pay for an insulated and customisable testing environment. Plus some sites have the nice habit of badly crashing early IE versions, and recovery from that is quick on a VM.

Not to mention, with IE VM's we can install additional browsers (to enjoy the rendering differences in Windows and Mac Firefox versions). We can also customise IE to reflect the client's environments (for intranets or POS systems, etc). Pretty handy.

My Virtualbox images from modern.ie have been sitting around collecting dust ever since I started using Browserstack. You can even use it to test HTML5 audio.

Haven't tried it yet, but I hear you can also use Browserstack for Selenium tests (https://www.browserstack.com/automate/php).

I used to hate Browserstack due to latency but re-tried it recently and it's MUCH faster. If you've tried it before it's worth giving it another shot.

Browserling (https://www.browserling.com) is also an option.

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