Are you free to use those on non-Microsoft host operating system? I thought the last time I checked the host had to be Windows Professional.
Also you have to re-download the image every 3 months, and get it set up again. I can't just toss a virtualbox image on my personal Ubuntu machine and test in IE6-8. I need a Windows computer to test my personal sites (which are barely worth development time.)
"may or may not work in other hosting environments."
&
"simply shutdown the VPC image and discard the changes you’ve made from undo disks to reset the image back to its initial state. By doing either of these methods, you can technically have a base image which never expires although you will never be able to permanently save any changes on these images for longer than 90 days."
... so it seems pretty positive, really.
Which, as someone who'd like to see more Free operating systems and less proprietary ones, is a bit of a shame! :P
Yeah, I read the marketing copy too. It sounds like it's deliberately worded to avoid mentioning whether or not you're licensed to run it on Mac/Linux.
It is setup like a trial edition of Windows. It can be installed on anything really. Microsoft say the requirements are Windows XP and Above, but i did see code to convert from a VHD to a Virtual Box image. Also, you only need to download every 3 months if you want the latest, patched edition from MS. If you want to do it yourself, you can just recreate the image yourself (sysprep).
The 3 month expiry is what led to my company paying for licenses. Having to potentially pause development and spend time doing the same setup process 4 times a year is painful (and wasteful since there's no real reason apart from trivial licensing issues - the resulting install is the same).
But the virtual images are designed to run in VirtualPC. I managed to get one running in VitualBox on Linux, but it was complex, time consuming, and had other problems. Then the VM expired after a few months, yayyy, more time wasting.
A BizSpark account will cost you $100 over the course of 3 years. You can get every OS they've released and run them on whatever you want. Yes, you'll have to spend time installing the OS, but Win 7 installs pretty quickly these days and that's the only way you're getting IE 9 anyway. It was a pretty good investment for us. I run Win 7 in VMWare Player on Linux & VMWare Fusion on Mac pretty regularly.
The admin interface sucks. Downloading software and getting your keys couldn't be much easier though. I haven't had to deal with the accounting end of it yet, so I can't speak to that.
Yep, that's what I was referring to when I said "opposite of straightforward".
I've been reading a lot of these kinds of articles from the IE team lately ("Our browser is better now, why does everyone still hate us?"). And I have to admit, IE9 is a huge leap forward in terms of standards compliance and general non-wonkiness.
But until they really focus on making the development and testing processes better, I'm still going to groan about having to support it.
To be fair, IE introduced the first JavaScript profiler I had come across. The problem is the toolchain is locked at the time of the browser release. They need to have something periodically updated if the browser isn't going to update that frequently.
So Microsoft provides virtual machines with IE on them? And they're for VirtualPC? That's kind of hilarious, although it'll probably seem less so next time I need to debug something in IE.
The images arbitrarily expire after about two and a half months, and then (last time I used them at least), there's an interval of time where they don't put up new ones. I don't have time to download 11 GB of disk images every three months, and I certainly can't have MS arbitrarily making it so that I can't test in their awful browser for months at a time.
If you want to support IE, owning a copy of Windows is not optional.
Standards-compliant seems to have taken on an odd shift. Most of the cool new stuff people want to use aren't in any published standard. They're draft specifications and implemented through browser vendor extensions. So, it's more like a de facto standard because a lot of people are doing it and changing the draft after the fact is going to be painful as a result. But the whole de facto standard thing is what got IE in trouble in the first place.
Except Chrome and Firefox both regularly have issues showing up on one platform and not the other, so "Chrome or Firefox testing environments" include the browser and all 3 primary platforms at the very least.
Oh look at that, one of those platforms being Microsoft Windows you've already paid for the license you need for testing FF and Chrome.
That may be the case, but it's quite possible you just didn't catch them. Most people really don't do a rigorous comparison and even if they do, it's so menial a task that the brain shuts down and things slip through the cracks.
I've dedicated the last 2.5 years of my life to auto-detecting differences between browsers and have tested thousands of sites across a variety of fields. I was kinda surprised at the number of rendering issues I've come across with Firefox and Chrome in various combinations of versions and OS. I've even seen some pretty substantial rendering differences between Win XP and Win 7 in Firefox.
Anyway, your experience could be totally different. I've just come across a lot devs that have adopted this hivemind mentality around Firefox & Chrome and as a result, they stop testing thoroughly with them. Without thorough testing you can't know if you have problems, so it's really hard to conclude anything because the key data are missing. There's a gap between perception and reality.
It's also possible that each issue, once figured out, became something I know how to avoid. There really just aren't that many things that break in a browser across operating systems.
Also, in my mind, there is a huge difference between "this font doesn't render pixel-perfect in this os/browser combo", and "the javascript broke". One causes much more customer support cost than the other.
I actually go well out of my way to avoid pixel-perfect stuff. The cases I mentioned all affect opacity or position by > 30px. There's actually a lot that can go wrong given the different windowing systems. I'd expect there to be more rendering bugs than JavaScript because of that. I can't speak to the functional side as well as I'd like, but I should ping someone at Sauce Labs to see what they've experienced.
Fair, but I was more alluding to the fact that shifted elements, while a nuisance, don't necessarily cause a site to stop functioning like JS can (assuming I'm working on a JS-heavy web app).
He said that a testing environment costs $300. If developer time were free, then yes, he would have agreed that his argument is invalid. Developer time is rather valuable, especially when considering opportunity costs.
A developer is not a testing environment, and the developer price is paid for testing in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera or what have you. MSIE is no different on that front.
Of course a developer isn't a testing environment. Developers don't cost a fixed $300.
If there are differences between IE and (Chrome|Firefox|Opera), then it will require additional developer time. Just testing for those differences will require additional developer time.
I don't want to demonize IE. Supporting any browser requires testing. IE has been especially reluctant to adopt web developer trends and needs to work hard to regain developers' trust. Supporting it isn't just the cost of a testing environment.
I.e., miniscule relative to the cost of actually having a developer.