Tag Archives: web development

I’ve been struggling with a tricky problem in Web design lately: how to preview my sites in Internet Explorer. For my personal site, I largely ignore that buggy browser’s bizarre behaviors (see my archived tirade for details). But lately, I’ve been working on a Web redesign for a nonprofit group, and they need their site to be accessible. There’s no current version of Explorer for the Mac, and my old copy of IE5 doesn’t capture a lot of the more recent bugs the folks in Redmond have added. It seemed like the only reasonable option was to install Windows on my Intel Mac, paying hundreds of dollars to Microsoft to get a copy of their operating system, and then install Explorer. I have a moral objection to that, though, as it would mean enriching Microsoft, not in spite of, but because of their very worst habits.

Thankfully, the good folks at Codeweavers have come to my rescue. Instead of sending a big payment to Bill Gates, I can now send a measly $60 to this small company that helps support the Open Source movement. That’s the registration price for Crossover, a product very similar to the more popular Parallels. While both applications allow one to run Windows applications on the Mac, with Parallels you still have to shell out for a copy of Windows itself. Crossover eliminates that by using the open source Wine emulator instead. Now, back to hacking these stylesheets. Continue reading →