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I work on a Mac, but most of my users are on Windows. What's an easy way to test my websites in IE 7, 8, & 9? Wine seems kinda buggy and unfriendly.

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    Wine is kind of unfriendly, but I have used PlayOnMac before which greatly improves the user experience. It has a GUI installer for Internet Explorer and might be worth a try before setting up a VM.
    – gtmtg
    Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 16:11
  • Microsoft now has free Mac virtual machines just for this purpose. modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools
    – user13716
    Commented Jul 7, 2014 at 4:46
  • New tool released by Microsoft -> remote.modern.ie
    – Vigneshwaran
    Commented Apr 1, 2015 at 10:18

12 Answers 12

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I have the perfect solution! In 2013, Microsoft released a free officially-supported solution to help Mac developers test with Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 on Macs:

  1. Go to https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/
  2. Select your desired testing OS ("Mac")
  3. Pick a virtualization platform from among VMWare, Parallels, and VirtualBox. If in doubt, choose VirtualBox (which you can download from the VirtualBox site)
  4. Follow the directions to download VMs for the version of IE + Windows you want

Hope this helps.

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    AWESOME!!!! Its a shame we need to do this at all, but this is the BEST solution. Great share. Thanks.
    – T2theC
    Commented Nov 25, 2014 at 10:00
  • For sure... as a web dev in 2015 I will actually go the extra mile and say its fking ridiculous we have to run a virtualization tool to run a browser just to test... but hey, once they figure out fusion power in another 5 years maybe we will have a better solution lmfao
    – mike
    Commented Apr 18, 2015 at 4:32
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    Agreed. I wish we could emulate the browsers, or at least install them side-by-side. Too bad Microsoft has a terrible architecture across the board. On a mac the apps could come bundled with all the libs they need to run. Oh well. And as far as Web Dev 2015... Why are we even supporting IE*? sob
    – Volte
    Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 4:32
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    Unfortunately, this solution is no longer available.
    – Pedram
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 18:12
  • Looks like they've changed it up, but it should still work for IE11+"Edge Legacy" at least, though this is a far cry from the old separate IE7/IE8/IE9 VMs that I wish I had kept copies of. Here's the new description: Test IE11 and Microsoft Edge Legacy using free Windows 10 virtual machines you download and manage locally
    – jerclarke
    Commented Jun 24, 2020 at 14:08
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  1. Download and Install the free Oracle Virtualbox Virtual Machine software

  2. Utilize the scripts noted in the OS X Daily article Internet Explorer for Mac the Easy Way: Run IE 7, IE8, & IE9 Free in a Virtual Machine to download, convert and install Microsoft's free IE Testing VMs to be used on VirtualBox.

We’re going to walk you through how to install Internet Explorer 7, 8, or 9 in a virtual machine running Windows, directly in Mac OS X – for free. This is achieved by using the freely available VirtualBox software from Oracle, and combining that with free Internet Explorer testing virtual machines from Microsoft

Here is the scripts presented in the Article:

...

Install ALL versions of Internet Explorer: IE7, IE 8, and IE 9

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | bash

Install Internet Explorer 7 Only

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="7" bash

...

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  • These instructions are potentially outdated. Microsoft now distributes Windows + IE 6-11 VMs for web developers in a variety of formats at modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools
    – Anirvan
    Commented Sep 28, 2013 at 7:32
  • Anirvan, I tried that link and it all seems to be about subscription services (after free trial). Also many of the links don't go anywhere/ Not a solution I can recommend in the current form.
    – Michael Durrant
    Commented Sep 28, 2013 at 11:54
  • go to that link, and click "Download a Virtual Machine" (instead of the Browserstack link). I have step by step instructions at apple.stackexchange.com/a/103564/1777
    – Anirvan
    Commented Sep 28, 2013 at 15:23
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The age old question for web designers…

VirtualBox is awesome, but a pain to have multiple versions of Windows taking up space on your hard drive. Another option is using VirtualBox and only installing and running an app like ietester which is only available for Windows but allows you to render multiple versions of IE in one window.

Finally, my personal option of choice is a website called browserstack, You have to pay for it but it's really cheap and well worth it if this is how you make your living. I also own a Windows laptop just for doing thse kind of tests but more often than not use browserstack instead.

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  • Ah, I remember the days of space being an issue in these decisions. Nowadays my 500GB drive seems to help quite a lot.
    – Michael Durrant
    Commented Nov 29, 2012 at 12:33
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    I wish space wasn't an issue, all of my machines are 500gb plus and by the time I have my apps loaded (adobe master suite, autocad and ableton live+native instruments are the real space hogs here) my hard drive is feeling pretty stuffed already! let alone giving up the hundred odd gig of space it takes to run 5 different versions of windows.
    – JamiePatt
    Commented Nov 30, 2012 at 3:45
  • Yeah, but all I am looking to use is browsers. I certainly would not want to use Adobe image manipulation tools through an emulator given the drag-drop and other interactivity issues there would be.
    – Michael Durrant
    Commented Apr 6, 2013 at 22:48
  • crossbrowsertesting.com is also a useful and inexpensive site. It will also allow you local machine access in case you're need to do redirects to a local reverse proxy when you're testing.
    – recklesscoder
    Commented Apr 15, 2013 at 19:59
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Virtualization is definitely the way to go. There's VirtualBox as mentioned above, which is a free open source project. There are also two commercial offerings, Parallels and VMWare Fusion. Both of those have free trials so you can evaluate what might work best.

If you're wondering why to pay when VirtualBox is free, Parallels and Fusion are both commercially developed and supported software. If you run into problems, you can get help, rather than spend time searching for answers yourself. Additionally, VirtualBox is cross-platform, so it has fewer Mac niceties, and it's more of a DIY product - no quick setup or anything.

But you can make the call for yourself. TidBITS has a fairly recent article comparing Parallels and Fusion, with a good section on VirtualBox as well, and Ars Technica has a pretty comprehensive comparison of the latest versions of Parallels and Fusion.

Hope that's useful for you!

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http://www.spoon.net is fantastic tool and the reason I prefer it is it installs just the browsers, and side-by-side with your other programs in task bar. It works like a charm, however it is commercial, $12 a month, $60 per year. They plan to publish the app. on Mac soon.

IETester is OK for some basic testing, but it doesn’t handle scripts correctly and therefore is not a 100% reliable testing solution.

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Just thought I would add to this as I just found a great new free tool to view IE on a mac. Download "Sauce" from the mac app store. I have been using Virtualbox the last two years and this is much easier to install, doesn't have huge VM files, and the interface is much smoother. Sauce also has the ability to preview in IE 10 (which is complete crap). There is also another cloud based app called browser stack. Tried the free version and the interface is nice but it does cost some $$.

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    Note this does not appear to be available in the UK
    – tdc
    Commented Nov 15, 2016 at 20:18
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In addition to virtualization there's Codeweaver's CrossOver

http://www.codeweavers.com

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I don't have enough reputation to post a comment on @Anirvan's answer which helped me greatly. I'd just like to add that Rey Bango's blog which advocates for security reasons to set Windows Update to automatic causes a problem since IE gets auto-updated as well! MS has created separate auto-blockers for IE 9 through 11. I downloaded all the auto-blocker scripts and created a wrapper to call them on Dropbox. Extract the contents of the zip file and run IE9-11_blocker.cmd to block IE 9 through 11.

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Probably not as professional as the other answers, but if one just wants to see how IE is rendering the site, the following options are free and work without any heavy installation:

Note that none of them work locally (i.e localhost or 127.0.0.1).

Similar questions were asked in SO (here and here), but they are pretty old and the topics are closed.

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  1. Open Safari and navigate to Safari > Preferences from the menu bar.
  2. Click on the Advanced tab.
  3. Check the "Show Develop menu in menu bar" setting, then close the Preferences window.
  4. The Develop menu should now show in your menu bar.
  5. Go to Develop > User Agent.
  6. Here, you have to option to choose different browser options like Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. You can also choose Firefox and Chrome as the User Agent.

Source: How to view websites on your Mac that require Internet Explorer (or a PC)

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  • This is more of a way to access some picky websites that require IE, but no substitute for testing a page with actual Internet Explorer, which the question is about.
    – Jawa
    Commented Apr 27, 2018 at 7:26
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You can go through these ways to test IE on Mac machine

Also, you can use online platforms like LambdaTest, Sauce Labs or Browserstack to access Internet Explorer using Mac machine.

Some software from the above link:

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  • could you list some of the softwares from the link in case the link breaks? Use edit feature.
    – anki
    Commented Aug 20, 2019 at 13:23
  • How does installing RDP (your first link) help to test with IE, isn't there a Windows machine required somewhere?
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Oct 28, 2019 at 7:19
  • @nohillside Apple provides Microsoft Remote app. With the Microsoft Remote Desktop app, you can connect to a remote PC and your work resources from almost anywhere. apps.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-remote-desktop/…
    – saif sadiq
    Commented Oct 28, 2019 at 10:39
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A new, better answer.

First I used virtual box. Then I used browserstack

Now I use parallels

Around for a few years but lately made robust and even friendlier.

It's even easier than the others, setup is easier, saving state is easier, keyboard-mouse integration is better. Generally its better.

Only item of note is that it cost about $80

which should be petty change for most developer who are paid that in an hour or two. Paid software is actually my preference - it gives me some confidence that it will actually be maintained going forward. Plus I'm a developer... paying a... developer. Seems like a good thing.

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