New Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images are now available

Hooray.  Long term readers of this blog know how that I don’t like how some people “test” different Internet Explorer versions by turning their PCs into “Frankenstein” systems, and then expect that their “test results” can be trusted – not.

The Virtual PC compatible images available are:

XP SP3 with IE6 (expires 11 January 2011)
XP SP3 with IE7 (expires 11 January 2011)
XP SP3 with IE8 (expires 11 January 2011)

Vista with IE7 (expires 90 days after first run)
Vista with IE8 (expires 90 days after first run)

You’ll need a minimum of 3 GIG of free hard drive space to expand the VHDs.

Download here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en

By the way, don’t forget that Internet Explorer 9 is out in public beta too – you’ll need to build your own VM to test that one and, believe me, its worth testing. I’m certainly seeing interesting results when surfing using IE9 – everything from web sites that don’t display properly to web forms that are broken – I find myself swapping between IE9 and Google Chrome for some sites which are broken in some places and working in others.