How to install Internet Explorer (multiple versions)?

Question

I am developing one site which has chat feature in Rails. I am using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I need to check that the site is IE9 because the chat feature using socket io of HTML5. I want to know that how to install IE9 in Ubuntu. I have looked at Chrome and Firefox extensions but if any standalone is available then please give me suggestion.

Answer 1

Microsoft has created some customized Windows VHDs with the purpose of allowing web designers to test websites in Internet Explorer 10, 9, 8 and 7, for Free for 30 days:

You can download the virtual machine images from this website:

• Virtual Machine (VM), Windows Virtual PC & Browserstack | Modern.IE#downloads

From the site:

1. Download the SFX and all RAR files for the VM (smaller VMs may not have files with RAR extension). In each set below that contains a split archive, the provided text file (.txt) contains URLs to all files in the set, and this can be used directly with the 'wget' command in Linux. From the terminal, enter wget -i [URL TO TEXT FILE]. For Windows XP single file downloads, use wget [URL TO DOWNLOAD FILE] instead.

Example 1:

wget -i https://az412801.vo.msecnd.net/vhd/IEKitV1_Final/VirtualBox/Linux/IE8_Win7/IE8.Win7.For.LinuxVirtualBox_2.txt

Example 2:

wget https://az412801.vo.msecnd.net/vhd/IEKitV1_Final/VirtualBox/Linux/IE6_XP/IE6.WinXP.For.LinuxVirtualBox.sfx

1. After the download of all files for a set is complete, give the SFX file execute permission by typing chmod +x filename.sfx at the terminal.

2. Execute the SFX executable from the terminal with ./filename.sfx to expand the virtual machine to the current directory.

See also:

• Making Internet Explorer Testing Easier with new IE VMs - Rey Bango
• Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac | Hacker News

Answer 2

Download and Install the free Oracle Virtualbox Virtual Machine software

2. Use the scripts noted in the OS X Daily article Internet Explorer for Mac the Easy Way: Run IE 7, IE8, & IE9 Free in a Virtual Machine to download, convert and install Microsoft's free IE Testing VMs to be used on VirtualBox.

Then choose from any or all of these Internet Explorer versions:

Install ALL versions of Internet Explorer: IE7, IE 8, and IE 9

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | bash

Install Internet Explorer 7 Only

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="7" 

Install Internet Explorer 8 Only

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="8" bash

Install Internet Explorer 9 Only

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="9" bash

Note: If you happen to see this message The program 'curl' is currently not installed. when you run any of the curl commands above, you can install it by typing:

sudo apt-get install curl

Here you can see me running Internet Explorer 8 within my Ubuntu machine:

Answer 3

Here's the easiest solution:

https://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools

Haven't tried this but sounds interesting.

Answer 4

This is soo easy to do.

Do winetricks ie7 or ie8 or ie6, whatever you'd like. The installation will automatically run, whatsoever you will get a error that the installation can't detect the system architecture. Fix it by doing

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32ie7 WINEARCH=win32 winetricks ie7

in terminal and change the ie to the number you are doing, and then do

winetricks ie7

It should work now

Answer 5

Microsoft have now released Virtualbox images that you can download directly from them:

http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools

Test versions of IE using Virtual Machines that you download and manage in your own development environment.

Answer 6

I can't believe nobody has posted this yet - but what about Browserling? They provide a virtual machine that you can access online with both IE9 and IE10 (if you upgrade to a paid account, you can use IE7 and IE8 too).

Answer 7

You can install Internet Explorer, but as far as I know only versions 8 and below.

Here's how. I use PlayOnLinux, because it makes using WINE so much easier. If you don't have PlayOnLinux, install it from the Ubuntu Software Centre (if you want the latest version, go to the PlayOnLinux download page, click on "Ubuntu", and follow the instructions).

• Open PlayOnLinux. Wait a few seconds while it refreshes (the status bar at the bottom).
• Click on the big "+ Install" button. A new window opens.
• Click on the "Internet" button.
• Click on "Internet Explorer 8".
• Click on "Install".

• An installation wizard appears. Click Next; wait a bit.
• IE8 will start to install, asking you a question and then to accept the license terms. It will prompt you to install updates; clear this check-box and press Next.
• Wait a bit longer.
• When prompted, select "Restart now (recommended)". This will not restart your computer; instead, PlayOnLinux will simulate a Windows restart.

Now, you will have an Internet Explorer icon on your desktop and another within the PlayOnLinux window. You can double-click either of these to start IE8.

Note that the display will not precisely match that on Windows for several reasons, but at least it will give you IE8 on Ubuntu!

Answer 8

I don't think there's a good solution to this.

You could try CrossOver Office or IEs4Linux, which uses Wine, but I doubt the result will be very good.

Alternatively you could install Windows on a virtual machine such as VirtualBox and do your testings with real IE.

Answer 9

You could try one of the following. The first one works pretty well.

https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html

or

http://browsershots.org/

or

http://netrenderer.com/

Answer 10

For the best result, you should try to install IE 9 in VMware (unless you need any 3D acceleration--that will fail).

However you can try first to change the user agent with an addon on Firefox to it be recognized as IE 9, just to check if it loads and such.

Answer 11

Try

http://www.webupd8.org/2011/09/test-websites-in-internet-explorer-9-8.html

which this refers to https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

which downloads and configures free virtual machine images from microsoft.com to run in VirtualBox.

I tried winetricks, ies4linux, playonlinux and other wine IE installers. The resulting IE was never useful to me. – I need it to run ActiveX controls for online payment/banking in China (absolutely no way around it), and this actually works!! Speed is surprising usable on my Atom Netbook.

Answer 12

The best option is to run IE from the VirtualBox. Some time ago Microsoft created some files to run IE 7, 8 and 9 for free from VirtualBox(no Windows license needed). Give it a try.

Quoted from Webupd8.org:

Microsoft has created some customized Windows VHDs with the purpose of allowing web designers to test websites in Internet Explorer 9, 8 and 7, for free. To make it easier to set up, xdissent has created a Mac OSX / Linux script that will download the required files, extract them, install the latest VirtualBox guest additions and so on.

Read more here. :)

Answer 13

I find that wine is severely limited in testing IE and is only half a solution anyway, since you don't know if a proper IE installation in Windows will render differently (I found firefox to render differently in Ubuntu and Win XP).

And because IE is so integrated into Windows (I believe MS thinks of this as a strength even thou it's the equivalent of tight coupling - which is bad design), the single IE pack that allows you to run multiple IE's doesn't work that well either (just broken functionality).

So what I did was create 4 virtual boxes (only need to be about 1 gig each), with IE6 - IE9 on them, with a full installation for each. This has proven fairly reliable in terms of faifulness to rendering. You can, of course, also install firefox and chrome on one of them (to confirm that the site looks great in those on Windows too). It does stress the machine a bit if I run more than 2 at a ti

Answer 14

Is this for personal/normal use or for testing website development?

If it's for normal browsing, you can get winetricks. Then run

winetricks ie6

or

winetricks ie7

or

winetricks ie8

And it should install a barebones, just-functioning version of IE. It won't be the full thing though. You may find that running IE in VMWare Player or VirtualBox with their seamless integration may be a better choice.

If this is for testing web development, have a look at browsershots.org which can test the website for you in different browsers and versions.

Answer 15

As of today (Sep 30, 2010 and Wine 1.3.3), IE 8 does not work in Wine. It will install and load, but it won't connect or render a page and the window will have a lot of visible glitches.

If it ever does work in the future, you will need to use the Wine1.3 packages from the Wine PPA.

To Install it, the simplest method is to use winetricks. If you've added the PPA and installed wine you should already have the winetricks package -- simply type winetricks ie8 to do the install.

If you're using different versions of Internet Explorer for web development, I highly recommend creating separate wineprefixes for each one. See my blog post: http://yokozar.org/blog/archives/236

Answer 16

BTW, you can bypass installing all the browsers of the world and test your webpage by using a tool like Browser Shots.

(I'm not answering your question, but just thought I'd mention since by looking at your comments it seems this is why you want to install IE on Ubuntu)