Can I get away with testing sites using IE8 with IE7 compatibility on?

As a developer, can I safely upgrade to IE8 and use its IE7 compatibility mode to test how sites look in IE7? For IE6, I have a virtual machine and it is quite inconvenient. I don't want to upgrade to IE8 and then have another virtual machine now for IE7.

Or is IE7 compatibility mode really different and I can't rely on that?

Upvotes: 12

Answers (9)

abjennings

Reputation: 2791

Multiple IEs was listed in another answer.

There's a successor to "Multiple IEs" called Internet Explorer Collection that is more up to date.

Upvotes: 0

Alexei Tenitski

Reputation: 9360

Seems that Microsoft has finally released Expression Web SuperPreview

It can be downloaded here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8e6ac106-525d-45d0-84db-dccff3fae677&displaylang=en

Upvotes: 0

alex

Reputation: 490143

Don't forget IETab for Firefox... making things that little bit easier. Though IIRC, you can only use this to test the version that's default on your system.

Upvotes: 0

Peter Craig

Reputation: 7279

You should try using IE Tester - a life saver. It lets you view a website on IE 5.5, 6, 7, current installed version, and 8 beta all in one program - each browser version loads in it's own tab and can be split screen etc.

Upvotes: 3

Guffa

Reputation: 700152

Microsoft is developing a tool called Expression Web SuperPreview to make it easier to test for the growing fauna of browsers.

Blog entries describing it by Long Zheng and The Expression Web Team.

Upvotes: 6

Michael Benny

Reputation: 428

Compatibility mode in IE8 is not a 100% emulation of IE7. Security changes were not versioned, and some DOM operations were not versioned. Check out this blog post form Microsoft for a list of changes.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/03/12/site-compatibility-and-ie8.aspx

Upvotes: 11