I haven't used the Tredosoft version of multiple IEs,but I did use an earlier incarnation of the same approach in 2005, withIE4, IE5.0 and 5.5 among the browsers I tested. The results were notencouraging.
This approach is much more lightweight than having to first downloadmultiple virtual machines and then run them simultaneously, but at the endof the day it is still based on hacks. The problems I found were not just with conditional comments, versionnumbers and cookies (problems which apparently have been solved --http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/multiIE.html), but alsowith JavaScript. If I remember rightly the discussions from that time, the allegedly "standalone" versions of the browsers stillmanaged to use the JavaScript engine of your main installed browser. When I tested my site on a machine with only IE5.5. installed, I foundthat I got different results from what I saw in my "standalone"parallel-installed version of IE5.5. In the end I decided that the whole side-by-side testing process was fundamentally unreliable. If you read some of the comments on Tredosoft's own page(http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE), it appears there are still problemswith the side-by-side approach -- unexpected browser crashes etc etc. So my recommendation is don't take the seeming short-cut. The virtual machine approach will be better in the long run. And when developing, I would say that if you can, use a "progressiveenhancement" approach - start with solid html that will work in any browser,then add CSS, and JavaScript (and AJAX and Flash etc etc) that will deliver a superior experience tothe newer browsers that support them, but will degrade gracefully (i.e.without throwing a ton of error messages) for the old browsers. If your client doesn't like the idea of the site looking and behavingdifferently in different browsers (the likely consequence of"progressive enhancement"), then I would say start by developing yourCSS for the latest, most standard-compliant browsers, then second, useconditional comments to target specific corrective style sheets at theold, dead browsers. I know that in such a situation, some other people might prefer CSS"filters" or hacks for dealing with such inconsistencies betweenbrowsers. But using browser-specific override style sheets at leastmeans that your main style sheets can be kept relatively clean, focused and freeof crud. -- Alan Cocks User Interface Designer LinkMe Pty Ltd ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
