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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I think the Windows Phone team deserve some credit for doing this, knowing that the developer reaction to it will be deeply negative (read: most comments in this thread).

The simple fact is that it works better for Windows Phone users. If developers hadn't been using webkit-prefixed CSS everywhere it wouldn't be an issue, but it is.

That said, I wish Windows Phone IE had better developer tools. Both Android and iOS let you plug your phone in via USB and access the web console. It's great.

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I agree. The first release of IE had a user-agent starting with Mozilla and its something all major browsers (Chrome, Safari, IE, Firefox) still prefix their user-agents with.

  Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 3.1)

Still none of that detracts from how broken relying on user-agent to improve user experience is. Browsers like Chrome seem to handle features like webp support better with the Accept: image/webp header but even that has its limitations if you care about animated webp or not say.

You can do it on your desktop,

http://oi58.tinypic.com/2rrnyxc.jpg

Which is certainly better than nothing, but not much fun when it comes to debugging touch gestures and the like.

This is also symptomatic of the way Windows clients have fallen out of favour with many devs generally. Android people have enough trouble persuading them (and designers) that the world isn't just Apple, but having a toolchain that requires Windows desktop? Instant not-going-to-happen.

Yes. It feels philosophically unfair to complain about, but I want a Windows Phone emulator for OS X. Of course, Windows users don't get an emulator for iOS either, but Apple has popularity on their side.

Couldn't you technically run Windows 7/8 under VMWare and then run the Windows Phone tools under that? VMWare has nested virtualisation (at least on Workstation 10 on Windows, think its there on Fusion or the Paralles options). And given MS give free VMs for testing IE on Macs too, your a step closer...

Last time I tried, no. This is going from memory so I may be incorrect, but the WP emulator required some level of hardware virtualisation that VirtualBox (at least) could not offer in that nested way.

Parallels supports this nested virtualization. The WP 8.1 emulator requires HyperV which Parallels supports. I've managed to get this working on a Mac with a Parallels VM running Windows 8.1 running a Windows Phone 8.1 VM. It... worked, but needed lots of memory.

You can get a free VM from MS to test under IE at https://modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools

On the mac, they are support VMWare, VirtualBox and Parallells.

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