IE6 is a pain, especially supporting it when you're trying to build something really wonderful with javascript. However when you're web metrics come back showing over 60% of your users use it you really have to go that extra yard to put a smile on their face, it's tough but it's worth it in the end.

Thankfully a good friend pointed me to a site called evolt.org providing standalone copies of IE6, should help.

There are alternatives, Microsoft provide Virtual PC images to help you support their latest browsers; they've got a lifespan of about 3 months per download so you've got to grab a new one every couple of months but good as an acid tester.

On the Linux front you should be able to use the standalone IE6 build from the link above with WINE, or IE4LINUX.

Beyond that there's IETester for Windows, good for Vista as it's hard to get IE6 on Microsoft's latest O/S (xp is easier).

There's also another browser built by the Japanese company fenrir called Sleipnir for Windows which allows you to run Firefox and Internet Explorer side-by-side, last time I tried it had some stability issues but it looks to be getting there with the 2.8.2 release.

Should help.

...by the way the engine used by IE is called Trident ;-)

After many months of hard work on behalf of the Mozilla corporation, and lots of testing and fixes from so many smarties; Firefox 3 has finally and officially gone gold.

Better standards compliance, security, memory fixes, just tons and tons of new improvements (not to mention the new rendering engine), this one's a goodie.

Go download it now, Ghandi would be proud ;-)

IE 4 Linux

For cross-browser testing you can thankfully run IE6 (and 5/4) on Linux with the handy IE4Linux package.

• IE 4 Linux

Assuming you've got WINE you'll also need cabextract, so add a repository to your distro,

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt hardy main

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install cabextract

Installing IE6 on Linux is a little tricky, the best way i've found to get it working is doing;

su root
wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
./ies4linux

Click to create icon on Desktop, it'll run thru downloading packages and prefixes for Wine after which you should have IE on your Linux distro, which will be accessible (if you lose the desktop shortcut) from,

/root/bin/ie6

Safari / WebKit

Apple's Safari browser is powered by the WebKit rendering engine, which thankfully is an opensource project and can be installed and tested against on your Linux machine via a few steps (yep, i've run thru this and it does work).

First get the dependencies,

sudo aptitude install autoconf automake libtool bison flex 
gperf libicu-dev build-essential libxt-dev libsqlite3-dev 
libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev libglibmm-2.4-dev libgtk2.0-dev 
libcurl4-openssl-dev libxslt1-dev

Now goto http://nightly.webkit.org/ and grab the latest nightly build.

Unzip and Terminal into the archive dir and build the source,

./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-svg-experimental
make

Once that's all done (which will take a while) you should now have a mini-WebKit browser in which to test against via...

./Programs/GtkLauncher

Navigate to the ACID3 website to test for standards compliance here http://acid3.acidtests.org/.

You should get 100/100, WebKit is pretty on when it comes to standards.

Quick Note. Unlike Firefox, Internet Explorer handles password fields a little differently, blanking out whatever value you pass it within a 'value' tag.

So...

Will have a password box in Firefox starred out, but in IE it'll appear blank.

To get around this you can use Prototype to inject a value into the password field, so the user see's it as starred out.

$('mypass').value='**';

Note, if you're generating the form dynamically with...

var innerhtml='

Only fire your $('mypass') code after the form has been written to the page otherwise you won't be able to get a handle on it (most cases you won't ever have this problem).

It's hard to do but these might help,

• X-Ray, a bookmarklet to examine elements within the document model, similar to firebug's 'inspect'.

• Fiddler, an http debugger for ie 6/7

• IE Developer Toolbar, similar in power to firebug but in no way as comprehensive.

• IETester, full-blown IE6 standalone browser, finally you can test against IE6 on Vista!