When you are laying out websites, testing in different versions of IE is really important, but also really hard, as when you install an new version it writes over the top of the old one, so you can’t have two side by side. For a long time Multiple IEs was a good way round this problem. Of course it’s no replacement for a real test machine (or virtual machine) but it’s a useful tool for developers to do some quick checks. However javascript support is notoriously bad, and it is gradually going out of date, so we have started using spoon which is a great replacement.
But now the new firewall settings have blocked us from using this. Back to square one. Then I remembered a tool that I have used in the past that did something like multiple IEs but was much better. It took me ages to find it again, so I am blogging so that I don’t forget and maybe someone else will find this too. The tool is called IE Collection and it does a great job.
scruffian 
4 responses to “Testing in old versions of Internet Explorer”
Have you thought about trying http://www.browsershots.org? It’s free and can check many, many different browsers. You can’t text Flash properly, or animations or JavaScript that is executed by the user, but it’s brilliant for testing CSS and HTML rendering, etc.
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yeh i’ve used that before. it’s good but it’s not quick. running spoon or ie collection locally means you can do lots of quick iterations…
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True. If I am iffy about a layout problem I usually first test in Opera to make sure it’s not my coding that’s the problem. I have a Mac, which as you may know has such a bad version of IE that CSS background images don’t even work; that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
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in mac I use virtual box to host a virtual machine which runs IE Collection!
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