How will Internet Explorer 8 affect QA testing for Web Applications

Question

Now that IE 8 is available:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/worldwide-sites.aspx

That's three flavors of IE to manage - 6, 7, 8 and QA code against and if you add in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc - 6 browsers.

How are folks dealing with all of these browsers and enabling the most diversity amongst them with their code?

What do you think about Virtual Machines with the base Operating Systems and then clone them and upgrade the browser so we have Windows 2000 Pro with IE 6, 7 and now 8 and then WinXP Pro with IE 6, 7, and 8, etc?

Answer 1

A new program that Microsoft is releasing is called Microsoft Expression SuperPreview and will allow you to test websites in IE 6/7/8, and when complete will allow you to test in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

Edit: Here's the MSDN blog post concerning it:

http://blogs.msdn.com/xweb/archive/2009/03/18/Microsoft-Expression-Web-SuperPreview-for-Windows-Internet-Explorer.aspx

Answer 2

I personally hope to drop support for IE6 soon as a result. ;-)

"Soon" may end up being longer than I like, but for sure no new development will be supporting IE6.

I'm actually curious to see where libs like jQuery stand. Previously they said they support the latest official build and the previous one for a major browser (e.g. it was IE7 and IE6)... I wonder if the next version of jQuery will dump IE6. It would be a bold, brave move, but certainly make for a better, tighter library in the future.

Answer 3

IE6 is already starting to lose support and I feel the IE8 release may be the last straw. Very few products have three seperate supported products at once.

I have dropped support for IE6 in most sites by now. I throw Dean Edward's script at the page and if IE6 still doesn't work, that's the end of it unless IE6 is vital.