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I do a bit of web development and need to test my site in various versions of IE (all the way back to 6).

I've been firmly in OSX and linux-land for about 5 years and have never used Windows 7, let alone Windows 8.

I plan on installing a version of Windows as a VM on my Mac. Before I spend any money on a licence I thought I would ask if there was any advantage in installing Windows 8 for this situation, or if I should just stick with Windows 7. What little I know about Windows 8 makes it sound like there'd be an annoying learning curve, but I don't want to miss out on anything.

brad
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2 Answers2

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Internet Explorer 6 only runs up to Windows XP and is not supported in anything after that. You might be able to install it on Windows 7 but that'd probably require some hacking.

Internet Explorer 7 and 8 run in Windows XP SP2, but as soon as you get to Internet Explorer 9, you need at least Windows 7. Internet Explorer 10 also runs on Windows 7. So, in the end you'd have to buy a license for Windows XP and Windows 7. A license for Windows 8 is not needed.

I would, however, recommend you to look at modern.IE, a site Microsoft dedicated for testing browser compatibility. You can download free images for all testing purposes and virtualization platforms there:

With those you can even use Parallels or VirtualBox in OS X directly—no need for setting up a native Windows installation.

slhck
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The question that anyone who wants to answer your question has to ask themselves is: are there any features available in Internet Explorer 10 that are only available in Windows 8?

Luckily for you, Microsoft has a pretty good list of differences on MSDN.

The list mainly states that you'll lose

  • Some DOM events,
  • some CSS properties
  • and some DOM properties.

All of which are related to touch interaction.

In short, unless you're going to be testing touch features and implementations, you should go with Windows 7.

slhck makes a good point though, if you don't have any reasons beyond Internet Explorer, you might as well not get any version of Windows.

I would, however, recommend you to look at modern.IE, a site Microsoft dedicated for testing browser compatibility. You can download free images for all testing purposes and virtualization platforms there:

Thor
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