Testing web pages in IE on a Mac using VirtualBox


Photo by Erda Estremera on Unsplash
6 February 2013

Mostly for my own future reference, here’s a quick low-down on how I like to test apps and web-pages in IE from my Mac.

Recently, I was building my mom a website and, while I’ve convinced her to use Chrome or Firefox, many of her friends (and much of the world) are still on IE8 or IE9 where things are a little different.

Here’s a way I’ve found to do real-time development on a Windows box with IE:

Getting started

Download VirtualBox and use the nicely packaged Windows/IE images.

Accessing a locally hosted app

If you’re serving your app from your host machine, use http://10.0.2.2:[PORT] to access it.

Tips for using static HTML

If you’re developing static HTML pages (maybe using something clever like Stasis) you would think you could share a folder from your host machine to your virtual machine. Alas, this doesn’t work.. Instead, you can use the cool Python built-in web server like so:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer [port]

Then use the URL & Port above to access the files from your virtual machine.

Enjoy!

Tags:  DevOps