It’s a sad fact when you get excited about the availability of a new version of Internet Explorer, and even sadder if that version should be Internet Explorer 6!  However, with 20% of Internet users still using Microsoft’s les-than-perfect IE6 browser, any web designer/developer worth their salt has to ensure that their websites look and work properly in IE6 as well as the ‘better’ browsers!

These days, most developers will be working on a Windows Vista platform, simply because this is what most new machines are shipped with (and you always need to have the newest most, powerful machine right ;-P )

This has posed a problem if you need to test your websites in IE6. The only two real options available until now were:

- keep an old machine running IE6, and fire this up whenever you need to test

- use browsercam.com to see how your design looks (but this doesn’t help if you need to interact with form elements, or you have any dynamic AJAX type effects, as it simply takes a screenshot of the site)

There has been an app called MultipleIEs that has been around for years that allows different versions of Internet Explorer to be used on the same machine, but this program doesn’t work on Windows Vista, giving a crash when you try and load it.

Now however, those clever folk at My DebugBar have come up with the answer - IETester, an alpha program that works on Vista, and allows you to test how your website displays in all versions of IE from 5.5 to the new IE8 release.

Get the application here

Some other interesting posts:

• True cross browser CSS transparency / opacity (inc. IE8)