I'm sure as hell not going to pay Microsoft any more in licensing fees to make stuff work in their crappy browsers. I think web developers should look into a class action case against Microsoft for failing to make their browser standards compliant - it sure costs us a lot extra in development time. :p
how do you handle licensing/activation in these VMs? I have parallels on my Mac and a 'proper' bootcamp install of WinXP which I need for work ... and I'm not about to screw with that installfor the sake of testing another POS version of IE.You need a license for each instance of XP that you run. AFAIK, you only need one license to multi-boot XP on a single computer (but you should check that!) so I don't see why it would be any different for multiple images run singly in a VM. NB: I'm talking XP here; I vaguely recall something about the Vista EULA (spit!) specifically excluding installation in a non-MS VM, so you'd need to check with your lawyers on that one... :/ However, I'm using my MSDN Universal (or whatever it's now called) copy of XP. I built an image once, backed it up, and it became my IE6 test image. I copied it a couple of times for an IE7 image, an IE8 image (as yet unused!), a Chrome image, and a .NET environment for running a couple of Windows tools and testing legacy .ASP websites I have to maintain from time to time. It all runs very nicely in KVM, and lets me test in IE without shutting down Linux :)but I'd love to be able to have a prinstine winXP image laying about that I can repeatedly screw up in the name of compatibility and cross-browser testing.Certainly QEMU / KVM, and I'm pretty sure the others too, allow you to run in snapshot mode whereby "hard drive writes" are held in temporary files and only written back to the image if / when you tell the VM to commit. Thus, you don't even need to refresh the image if you just test in snapshot all the time. (and work with network data files, or version control workspaces)
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