Quick Tip: The Best Way to Run Internet Explorer on your Mac

Jeffrey Way on Jul 20th 2010 with 66 comments

Tutorial Details

Topic: Wine
Estimated Completion Time: 3 Minutes

While Mac users do have a handful of resources available, when viewing new web designs in Internet Explorer, the quickest solution is to use Wine, which can create a “wrapper” for the native PC Internet Explorer app! Even better, an app, called Wine Bottler makes adding the IE icon to your dock amazingly simple. I’ll show you what to do in today’s video quick tip!

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By Jeffrey Way

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I'm the editor of Nettuts+, and love making the process of building for the web as easy as possible. Also, I'm finishing up my latest book on Laravel Testing! If you want be friends, say hi on Twitter.

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Simon
I disagree with the title.
I’ll looked at wine a month ago – it is very slow and buggy.
I’ll stick with Virtual Box.

http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
Author
Don’t get me wrong – virtualization is great. But, many times, all I need is to do is quickly check a page in IE6. This is a very fast solution for that need.

stakabo
if you save your virtual box state insted of shutting them down, it’s juat as fast to start up …

Jay
Vertual Box is cool, but don’t you need to install windows on it? with WineBottler it looks like you can just ran the app you need and don’t have to install XP/7/etc.
Also you need to spend the money for the lic for xp/7/etc.
Yes? No? Did I get something wrong?
Jay

http://andrealazzarotto.com/ Lazza
That’s right, you just install the app in Wine.

Chris
Yeah,
I use Parallels Desktop. I’ve always hated wine.

Jeremy
Agreed. I use Parallels with IE Tester, and of course, the real IE’s. I like my bugs from the source without adding other layers that have bugs of their own. If I do have to run a quick visual scan though (just to see if anything major is off) I’m partial to Adobe’s Browser Lab.

http://spotdex.com Davidmoreen
I remember using wine a while back when I first got my Mac. I was using it for mirc. It was the worst, buggy as hell, almost unusable.
I think using a virtual machine is far more sufficient.
http://blog.verysofisticated.com/ Matt
I would agree with you, but WineBottler does depend on the Wine libraries. Using Wine version of Internet Explorer is not guaranteed to be 100% correctly rendered. The Wine libraries, in fact, fix a few issues in IE and introduce a few. If you want accurate results, use Windows. Wine is a good solution, but it’s not foolproof.
http://john-sparrow.com John Sparrow
When this works, it’s a decent enough solution for checking a niggling little layout issue. However, for stuff like testing a piece of jQuery interaction, it’s so slow it’s unusable for me.
That said, this is a great free solution for simple IE checks.
http://brianswebdesign.com Brian Temecula
I usually think of testing websites as related to OS/Browser combinations, and I just don’t see Mac/IE as something I’d really need to test. I use Virtual PC for my IE6 needs. Can’t beat the native OS for rendering!

http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
Author
This isn’t Mac IE — It’s PC IE running as a wrapper on a Mac.
The original Mac IE was far different from PC IE at the time.

Chad
Great tip, Jeff. Thanks!
John
[Shudders at the memory of Mac IE] That was truly an awful browser… people think IE6 was bad, IE 5.2 for Mac was a thousand times worse. You would get something to render correctly in IE5.5/PC and Netscape only to find that IE5.2/Mac looked like a tornado hit it.
Great tip, I have been looking for something to replace the Vista machine with IETester.

http://butenas.com Neoman
Guys.. maybe we can start the movement and kill IE6? :) Stop support this damn ^@$# browser…

Rhys Thomas
The ‘movement’ has already started. 2/3 of the biggest tech corporates,Microsoft and Google have dropped support for it so it seems like IE6 is on it’s death bed

Tony
Microsoft recently announced they are supporting IE 6 until 2015 due to the number of businesses, organisations and gov depts that use software reliant on IE6.
Therefore, if you’re planning on building sites for anyone other than those who are likely to upgrade to the latest browser it really is a good idea to check your user stats and support it if needs be even if it is a pain.
The solution I use for a mac is to run VMware Fusion with XP installed, then within that I have a number of virtual HDD such as XP IE6, XP IE 7, Vista IE8 etc and Virtual PC to run them. Don’t bother trying to use windows 7 and VMware Fusion it’s too slow (and that’s using a 27″ Quad Core I7 imac).
Microsoft give you Virtual PC for free and the virtual HDD states too so you just need to buy a copy of VMware Fusion as a complete PC test facility running natively (on a PC) through your Mac. Easy!
John
Microsoft is supporting it till 2014… unless their official announcement has changed.
The problem is companies like AT&T, Honeywell, IBM, etc have legacy apps that only work on IE6. Last month IE6 was even with Chrome users, which is double Safari users.
IE6 isn’t hard to code to if you use a proper reset, and know its quirks.

victor87
I’ve found wine to be very buggy and no longer use it. Since most of the time, checking the page in ie6 doesn’t just end at checking it, you’re most likely going to edit some code and keep coming back to it until it works. In that typical development scenario I’ve found it quicker and easier to use parallel desktop.
http://technikboom.com Dani Schenker
Why would you want to use IE anyway? :D

jason
Great question. I say we just boycott IE. Then maybe user will start to use a real browser.
http://www.vaporizerkits.com Zephyr Ion
There are still a lot of people who use IE, especially people who don’t know much about tech. Even for a tech website, my analytics show that over 60% of the people who visit the site still use IE. So it’s always a good idea to check your work on IE too ;)
http://briankuzma.com brian
not to mention it’s often a requirement when building a website for a client.
cloaywong
Seem that Seibel only run on IE 6 and above. No choice I hv to find a way.

Manu
Like on Crossover for Mac : IE8 dosen’t work :(
http://jarrydcrawford.com/ Jarryd C.
Sounds interesting, although I use VMware Fusion 3 with Windows 7 installed. I use that to test IE8, then have two Windows XP VMs running inside of Virtual PC 2007 inside of Windows 7. These two test IE6 and 7 respectively. I have about 8GB of RAM so it’s not really an issue if I just leave it open all the time with all the VMs running, dedicating a portion of my RAM to it. Haven’t had any problems so far.
efaistos
Why the hell I would do something like this ?!

http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
Author
To test your designs…

http://michael.theirwinfamily.net Michael
Sorry…but I got a kick out of that response!

Spencer Westwood
It ‘kind’ of works but is pretty useless. Jquery can baulk, the icons and colouring come out a bit messy if you’ve updated your quartz X11. The fonts don’t match up and thus It’s box model does not match with ie7 pc version.
Virtualbox or similar seems to be the way to go along with an install of IETester.
Kind regards, Spencer
http://jonweb.co.uk Jon Cousins
I got OS X running on my Window 7 PC, which means I have IE natively. =)
http://www.webdesignforums.net Rick
Hmm…you should have put a note saying its VERY buggy, doesnt render the same as on Windows, and is for IE 6 or lower only!
IE7 *might* just about work (but again, VERY buggy) but IE8 will not work as its integrated into Windows, not standalone.
Poor tip.
http://www.jordanwalker.net Jordan Walker
Just the title is almost an oxymoron!
Michio
I think I’ll stick to my current setup: 3 PCs (each PC is devoted to an install of IE6, IE7, and IE8 respectively). When I need to test, I just fire up all my PCs. I could have gone the VM route, but I had some old PCs and 3 installs of WinXP hanging around from old computers I inherited. I don’t see any other reliable way to test on different IE versions besides having 3 separate installs of Windows. I can’t wait till IE9 comes out! Time to buy another copy of Windows!
MR
Jeff, i got a question for you
I have the following markup:
div class “blockSection”
h5 Title of the section /h5
…
/div
now, the h5 for the .blockSection has a fixed height and a background image, 40px. For aligning the text vertically i always set the line-height same as the height, since the text wont break in 2 or more lines. But the problem is i’m using a font with font-face and it doesnt to aligning vertically in Firefox, Safari on Mac – is miscentered to the top. In windows IE looks good.
You know trick to make it right, without applying different line-height for browsers ?
http://webotle.com Alex Stomp
This is great! FINALLLYYYYYYYYYY a solution! :) thanks
http://www.milaju.com Kent
For any Linux users, you can do the same thing with Winetricks – http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks
test
body {display:none;}
http://www.japhex.net Jamie
Not sure if the spoon plugin works at well on a mac as it does a PC (yes i use a PC, please, do not abuse me – i’m trying to help!) but i find it pretty useful, even if it is a web app.
Saying that, i always favour vitual machines for IE testing..
http://www.spoon.net/IE6
matthew
For me the program installs fine, IE opens, but no connectivity. No pages open.
adrian
I’ve tried winebottler (found out about it on mac.appstorm) and from what I’ve heard it’s hard to tell what bugs are caused by internet explorer and what bugs are caused by winebottler, which is still in either alpha or beta
Willson
Wineskin is fantastic, I like it a lot better than wine bottler.
http://wineskin.doh123.com
http://www.therustedmusket.com Tony
Well the easiest way I’ve found to test in IE is to use Windows… I know I know, seems so simple…
martijn397
Tested it but detected alot of inconsistenties vs my virtual pc running both IE6, 7 and 8 so if i would give anyone a good advice: dont use this because it’s to far from acurate.
Thanks for the quick tips though Jeffrey, i really apprieciate all the work you’ve done!
http://www.shaneparkerphoto.com Shane Parker
I’ve tried the wine route, but I much prefer VirtualBox.
http://www.infrasoundkids.com L1
I use Macindows, which is much better and more stable. But nothing compares to the stability of Parallels
SiSo
What is the App at 1:15 which opened the Application folder?
http://www.designshack.net Joshua Johnson
I posted this tip on AppStorm a while back and got slaughtered for it in the comments. Rough crowd :)
Vin
IE6 support has ended, even Microsoft has told people to ditch it. No one needs to bother with hacking for ie6 anymore. Give the people who use it a reason to stop.

http://www.shaneparkerphoto.com Shane Parker
You’re way off. Lots of corporations have legacy apps that require IE6 who don’t want to spend the time/money to retool a new solution. Microsoft will support IE6 until 2014 because of this (which is unprecedented for software that is so old and crappy).
Further, I work for a company who sells 8,000 parts. In every order card, we place the browser that the user was using when they placed the order and so far we’re still at ~14% of users buying our products using IE6. Would you like to be the one to tell the CEO that he needs to take a ~14% drop in profits because we don’t want to dev for IE6 anymore? Ya. Me neither.
Does it suck that some of us still have to dev for IE6? Yes. Is the end of IE6 in sight? I think so. But in no way is it “gone” and “unsupported” at this point in time.

http://www.infrasoundkids.com L1
Just out of interest what was the IE6 usage % a year ago?
http://shaneparkerphoto.com Shane Parker
A year ago? It was very close to the same IIRC. The company I work for happens to have more than the usual number of IE6 users (yes, it sucks).

http://www.juicebox.com.au Jarrad
Having installed this, unless I am missing something, this seems to be completely irrelevant as there’s no javascript support?
Running IE7, javascript not working at all…..

Anthony
I second that.
Having installed IE7 and deepened my hatred of all things windows even further, It seems Javascript isn’t working at all.
I’ve googled and checked all my settings within IE7′s ‘Internet Options’ but sadly no joy.
It’s quite possible there’s something I’m missing. I’d love to get this working as, other than no javascript, it seems to be an extremely handy way to have a quick check in IE.

binkt
I think its high time MS do something quick about the issue concerning IE7′s ‘Internet Options’. I will be more than being happy to see the problem corrected on time. phen375 customer reviews

http://nashinteractivellc.com Nathan Nash
I have the same issue as well. My sites css displays properly and all the images have loaded, but the site relies on jQuery for presentation. IE7 shows that scripting is enabled but it doesn’t seem to be working.

http://madhukarah.tumblr.com madhukarah
Never crappy IE on Mac please !!
http://www.siteway.de PAul
Just gave IE a try on my mac a few days ago with winebottler and crossover. Because i would really love to test right on the mac.
Both solutions created a IE app without a Problem. But the IE App was really unusable! Took ages to load a website, frooze, could not resize/move the window and so on.
Ive used VMware and Windows7 to test all flavors of IE. Best solution for me. Paralles or VirtualBox might work.
http://www.entropydynamics.com Korky Kathman
I installed both IE7 and IE8, hoping, as many have said to use it as a quick check. However, my experience wasn’t near as good.
The first time I launched IE8 it came up and all I got was a “Connecting…” tab that stayed there for several minutes and never went away. I went ahead and typed in a URL to my localhost to test a site and it came up great. But when I tried the IE7 app, it just ignored everything and stayed at the “Connecting…” prompt.
I tried shutting down and reloading the IE8 and then it did the same as IE7, just stayed there. Also I’m getting a little box every time it opens up saying that some resource is updating. I shut down the X, and then ran it against a live site and still got nothing.
Might be I’m using a newer version with more bugs, but this pretty much is unusable right now for my needs. I do wonder if by uninstalling Wine and WineBottler, if the IE aps go away too?
http://www.tenaxtechnologies.com Agile team java
Since most of the time, checking the page in ie6 doesn’t just end at checking it, you’re most likely going to edit some code and keep coming back to it until it works. In that typical development scenario I’ve found it quicker and easier to use parallel desktop.
Mathieu
Why o why would you want to use Internet Explorer? I don’t understand. It’s the worst browser out there, it’s a nightmare!

cloaywong
because Seibel only work in IE, not other browser. ^%&^^&*$

Jay
Do I have to install XP in to WineBottler or can I just install ie8 in to it?
I installed WineBottler but can’t figure out how to get IE8 in to.
Is there an actual walkthrough on how to get this thing to work?
Best regards
Jay

Jay
Never Mind, I was looking at WineSkins, not WineBottler.
TY

Becca
No luck. Downloaded wine and winebottler. But when I try to install IE from there, it says the install exited with error and pulls up a console message which looks like jibberish to me. Winebottler also mentions error 15 after stopping the install of IE 1/4 of the way through. If you have any advice or can explain it, that’d be great, because I need IE for my school stuff online! :( Thanks.