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Comment by mcpherrinm | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft provides free Virtual Machine images for testing Internet Explorer.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1157...

Are you free to use those on non-Microsoft host operating system? I thought the last time I checked the host had to be Windows Professional.

Also you have to re-download the image every 3 months, and get it set up again. I can't just toss a virtualbox image on my personal Ubuntu machine and test in IE6-8. I need a Windows computer to test my personal sites (which are barely worth development time.)

It is setup like a trial edition of Windows. It can be installed on anything really. Microsoft say the requirements are Windows XP and Above, but i did see code to convert from a VHD to a Virtual Box image. Also, you only need to download every 3 months if you want the latest, patched edition from MS. If you want to do it yourself, you can just recreate the image yourself (sysprep).

The 3 month expiry is what led to my company paying for licenses. Having to potentially pause development and spend time doing the same setup process 4 times a year is painful (and wasteful since there's no real reason apart from trivial licensing issues - the resulting install is the same).

I haven't tried them, but the page says:

"may or may not work in other hosting environments."

"simply shutdown the VPC image and discard the changes you’ve made from undo disks to reset the image back to its initial state. By doing either of these methods, you can technically have a base image which never expires although you will never be able to permanently save any changes on these images for longer than 90 days."

... so it seems pretty positive, really.

Which, as someone who'd like to see more Free operating systems and less proprietary ones, is a bit of a shame! :P

Yeah, I read the marketing copy too. It sounds like it's deliberately worded to avoid mentioning whether or not you're licensed to run it on Mac/Linux.

But the virtual images are designed to run in VirtualPC. I managed to get one running in VitualBox on Linux, but it was complex, time consuming, and had other problems. Then the VM expired after a few months, yayyy, more time wasting.

I.e. they cost nothing but your time...

A BizSpark account will cost you $100 over the course of 3 years. You can get every OS they've released and run them on whatever you want. Yes, you'll have to spend time installing the OS, but Win 7 installs pretty quickly these days and that's the only way you're getting IE 9 anyway. It was a pretty good investment for us. I run Win 7 in VMWare Player on Linux & VMWare Fusion on Mac pretty regularly.

BizSpark is really great for a lean startup (we did use it), but it also incurs significant time costs:

- the website was a nightmare to use (maybe it has improved)

- it was impossible to work out what you could and couldn't do - I suggest just use it and ignore details.

- you incur a time debt three years later sorting out OS/Office installs.

If you are funded, MSDN and proper licenses might make more sense.

The admin interface sucks. Downloading software and getting your keys couldn't be much easier though. I haven't had to deal with the accounting end of it yet, so I can't speak to that.

Yep, that's what I was referring to when I said "opposite of straightforward".

I've been reading a lot of these kinds of articles from the IE team lately ("Our browser is better now, why does everyone still hate us?"). And I have to admit, IE9 is a huge leap forward in terms of standards compliance and general non-wonkiness.

But until they really focus on making the development and testing processes better, I'm still going to groan about having to support it.

To be fair, IE introduced the first JavaScript profiler I had come across. The problem is the toolchain is locked at the time of the browser release. They need to have something periodically updated if the browser isn't going to update that frequently.

So Microsoft provides virtual machines with IE on them? And they're for VirtualPC? That's kind of hilarious, although it'll probably seem less so next time I need to debug something in IE.

The images arbitrarily expire after about two and a half months, and then (last time I used them at least), there's an interval of time where they don't put up new ones. I don't have time to download 11 GB of disk images every three months, and I certainly can't have MS arbitrarily making it so that I can't test in their awful browser for months at a time.

If you want to support IE, owning a copy of Windows is not optional.

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