Being a non-dual-booting Mac user, I hit a snare when working on a website the other week. I knew that it worked fine in both Safari and Firefox, but it was untested in Internet Explorer. For as much as people tend to rag on Internet Explorer, it still dominates the browser market share, and because of this, ensuring a site works in Internet Explorer is critical. Even on this blog — one I would think to be pretty technologically savvy — 62% of my visitors use Internet Explorer.
Now, back to my original dilemma: I had a website untested in Internet Explorer, and had no way of getting Internet Explorer on my computer. After some Googling, I came upon Netrenderer. It allows you to paste a URL you’d like tested, and unlike other services, instantly outputs a screenshot of your site as it would appear in IE 6 or 7, based on your preference. Though it does cut off at the fold, or the bottom of the browser window, this has proven to be an invaluable tool for me in ensuring compatibility in IE for sites I design.
Oooh, this will be awesome for checking how my site is in IE 6. Kick-ass, nice find
Comment by Ranjani — July 18, 2007 @ 1:46 am
Sweet as just what i was looking for. Of course if microsoft would just force everyone to update IE7 then we will have less browsers to worry about.
Comment by Steven McCullie — July 24, 2007 @ 11:54 am
[…] The recommended approach is to design based on Web standards and such web pages will display well in IE version 7 and Firefox. Such a web page may or may not display well in IE version 6. However there is an increasing literature on the ways of getting around the typical problems. One practical problem is that it may be difficult to have two versions of Internet Explorer (version 6 and version 7) running on the same computer. A small help is given by IE NetRenderer. This allows you to check how a web page is rendered by Internet Explorer 7, 6 or 5.5, as seen from a high-speed datacenter located in Germany. (Tip of the hat to Henry.) It only shows the webpage “above the fold” but this will alert the designer to any major problems. […]
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