Chris Dickman (bio)

Not that Microsoft has really made it easy this time for designers and developers to check their work against both the latest release and earlier versions. As you may have found out to your horror if you did take the plunge and installed 7, good old MS is pursuing a scorched earth policy by doing its best to eradicate all traces of 6 from your system. It no doubt does so with the best of intentions (no snickering, you in the back row) but one has to wonder what Gates and crew thought we poor code twiddlers were supposed to do, in the event the world didn't switch to 7 overnight. It's a bit like those photos from the Russian post-revolutionary period: Trotsky? Never heard of him! (Please note that I'm not comparing Bill Gates to Stalin, or Microsoft itself to the relentless machinery of the Russian Communist-era administration. In fact, I'm a big Microsoft fan. Having clarified that, I can now continue.)

So, yes, I did take a deep breath early on and installed 7, lighting a little candle during the lengthy installation process for that late, not-lamented Number 6. It was with some trepidation that I subsequently went through Graphics.com but my fears seem to have been ungrounded so far—from a display perspective I honestly don't have any horror stories to report. But of course that could be due to the entire site being created in clean, standards-compliant CSS (feel free to laugh out loud at that part). Enough levity. You're reading this for some concrete suggestions on how to come to terms with 7.

The best approach is probably to simply keep 6 running on one or more of your systems and continue to use that for testing. This not always being a possibility, the brave have recourse to several non-MS authorized hacks to allow 7 and earlier versions of IE to not resort to sibling rivalry. For example, while I haven't tried it, preferring not to have my fragile old Registry manipulated by the likes of a balloon-twister at a birthday party, the Tredosoft site provides a number of ingenious solutions, but it must be emphasized that these are not for the faint hearted.

There are also several online services that render pages by emulating a variety of browsers. The Online HTML Renderer, for example, does its best to display online pages in IE 6 or 7, by creating a screen shot that also indicates how much of the page is visible in browsers with 800 and 1024 widths. Unfortunately, it only grabs the part of the page actually displayed in the browser, so the top of most pages is all you'll be able to check. On the other hand, it's both fast and free. Also free is the venerable Browsershots.org service, which creates screenshots using a wide variety of browsers on both platforms (at left is a Browsershots capture of Graphics.com). Alas, IE 7 is not yet one of the supported browsers, so this would be a solution for those who have installed 7 and still want to check 6. This service grabs the entire page but it can take some time for screen grabs to be rendered. There are also commercial browser emulators, such as NetMechanic's BrowserPhoto, which doesn't indicate whether it yet supports IE 7.

But whatever your approach, the time has come to grapple with the beast that is IE 7. I'd be interested in hearing from those testing their sites with 7—nightmare or piece of cake?

Chris Dickman
Graphics.com