Experienced web developers test their websites on lots of
browsers before the sites are deployed. Unfortunately, this can be a real
hassle. Some browsers run only on a few operating systems. There is no recent
version of Safari, for example, that runs on Windows. Edge, the new browser
from Microsoft, runs only on Windows 10 – not on Windows 7 or Windows 8. In
addition, some browsers are mutually incompatible. Although IE 11, IE 10, IE 9
and IE 8 all run on Windows 7, no two of these can even be installed – let
alone run – on a single Windows 7 PC.
Fortunately, ParallelsDesktop can help here – a lot. In
figure 1 you can see seven browsers all running simultaneously on my MacBook
Pro. (And if you can’t distinguish IE 9 from IE 11, figure 2 annotates the same
screenshot in figure 1.)
With this setup, a web developer or web tester can check
their site on seven browsers all at the same time – just point each browser at
your staging server. If a problem is seen in one browser, it can be corrected,
and the correction checked in all the browsers at once.n this dream setup for a web developer, I have taken
advantage of the fact that Parallels Desktop can run multiple different
operating systems at the same time, as long as you have sufficient RAM on your
Mac.
In setting up everything for this blog post, I used VMs from
Microsoft’s Modern.IE team. These VMs – available for download without cost
from inside Parallels Desktop – were created by Microsoft to assist web
developers, and an agreement between Microsoft and Parallels makes them
available to Parallels Desktop users. Figure 3 shows the download dialog inside
Parallels Desktop. (Note: Figure 3 has been Photoshopped to show you the full set
of Modern.IE VMs.)
So, if you are a web developer or tester, and if the hassle
of testing in multiple browsers is wearing you down, Parallels Desktop provides
you a better way.