Testing landing pages in Internet Explorer
Over the past few months, Google has been phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 for its sites and Web apps.
Yet NetMarketShare still puts IE6′s market share at more than 17% for June 2010.
So I think it’s way too early to stop making your sites and landing pages compatible with IE6. After all, that’s roughly one in six visitors who are still using the dinosaur browser.
Testing options
Services like Browsercam and Browsershots are really useful. You can see how your site looks in dozens of browsers on all the major operating systems…
… but you have to wait up to 30 minutes between screencaptures.
So if you want to check your CSS tweaks in real-time, you’re going to need to install IE6 on your computer.
Which is what I did previously.
I used Multiple IEs to install every version of Internet Explorer.
But yesterday I discovered a brilliant free tool called IETester.
It uses the rendering engines of every version of Internet Explorer from IE5.5 to IE9 Preview (IE9 Preview requires Vista SP2 or Windows 7).
And you can use tabs to see how your site looks in different versions of IE all on one screen.
Which means you can quickly fix those annoying IE quirks.
Other uses
You could also use it to check your advertisers’ landing pages.
If you’re using paid traffic and paying for every click, then you really don’t want to be sending every 6th visitor to a page that’s completely bolloxed up, right?
