Datasheet

❑ VMWare, Player: Available for free from http://www.vmware.com/products/player/ for

Windows and Linux.

❑ Virtual PC: Made by Microsoft, available for $129 from

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/

virtualpc

(the price does not include a license for running Windows in the Virtual PC).

Requires Windows or a PowerPC-based Mac.

❑ Q (pictured in Figure 1-2): Available for free from

http://www.kberg.ch/q. If you’re using

Mac OS X, Q is available as a universal application (it runs on both PowerPC-based and Intel-

based Macs).

❑ Parallels: Available for $49.99 from

http://www.parallels.com for Windows, Mac (PowerPC

and Intel-based), and Linux.

The best software for installing Windows from another operating system is software that uses virtualiza-

tion. Without going into the technical details, software using virtualization runs much faster. The other,

slower, much slower, in fact, method is emulation. Parallels and VMWare use virtualization, whereas, at

the time of this writing, Microsoft’s Virtual PC and “Q” both use emulation. Your computer will also

need serious horsepower to run two operating systems at the same time; see each respective website for

the system requirements of each of the aforementioned solutions. In my experience, software like this

works best with at least 1GB of RAM and about a 2 GHz processor.

Without the ability to install and work with Windows virtually using software such as VMWare, your

last resort is to uninstall IE 7 every time you need to test in IE 6, which can throw a pretty big wrench in

the testing process. Currently, the virtual machine solution is the one officially sanctioned and recom-

mended by Microsoft for testing in multiple versions of Internet Explorer. The IE team has responded

to requests from web developers for the ability to install and run multiple versions of Internet Explorer

side-by-side, and have said they are looking at the problem, but have not yet publicly announced a solu-

tion or released software to remedy the problem.

Internet Explorer for PowerPC Mac OS X

For PowerPC Macintosh users, I recommend not using or testing in IE for Mac. The capabilities and

bugs of IE for Windows and IE for Mac are very different. IE for the Macintosh has better support for

CSS (compared to IE 6), but it is an entirely different browser. The name may be the same, but the

browsers are very different. In fact, Microsoft has completely dropped support for IE for Mac, having

stopped development with a public announcement made in 2003, and having completely stopped sup-

port in 2005. It has less than a tenth of a percent of market share, if that much, and it does not run on

Apple’s Intel-based Macs.

For Mac users, I recommend Apple’s own Safari or a Gecko browser, such as Camino or Mozilla Firefox,

which I discuss further in the coming sections. If you don’t have Internet Explorer for Windows, you still

can work through most exercises and examples presented in this book, but if you are serious about web-

site design, you will need to find a way to test your websites in Internet Explorer on Windows, since it

has the majority of market share, and will enjoy that status far into the foreseeable future.

For news on what is transpiring in the world of Internet Explorer development, you might like to check

out the Internet Explorer Team’s blog at

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie. New IE features and news of

anything relating to Internet Explorer are announced on the IE Team blog.

Chapter 1: Introducing Cascading Style Sheets

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