You can, if you want to run Internet Explorer 7 on Linux. The older versions were already available. Why in the world will I do that! For two reasons - to be able to test designs and visit sites that have special affinity for IE. Of course it will still be required to do a final test on IE on Windows, but this can help a lot during the design process. The technique involves installing IEs4Linux and then using Google’s customized IE7 installer. The IE versions run on wine which is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix..


February 13th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
Unfortunately, transparent png support is either not available or broken with IE7 on wine and the rendering is quite poor. Unfortunately, until a better method is made, it seems necessary to stick with testing IE7 on Windows
If Microsoft made a standalone version of their browser, this probably wouldn’t be an issue. IE may be free to download, but it’s definitely not free to use.
February 14th, 2007 at 9:09 am
That is true. I think for any project, the final checking will have to happen on the specific browser on the specific platform. Getting IE 7 on Linux can relieve some pain of testing layout and formatting work frequently.
May 27th, 2007 at 8:57 am
Very Nice find Abhijit!
May 27th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Thanks Mayank, it is very useful.