Test Your Web Site in Internet Explorer 6 Using Microsoft IE6 Virtual Test Image

We all know that it’s a good idea to test our web pages in all popular browsers (to me that’s the various current versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox). It’s also a good idea to back up your data frequently, to listen to your elders, to not take a bath right after dinner, etc. Ok, so I admit I didn’t test my latest WordPress theme in IE6. While browsing the web on a friend’s PC, I discovered that my blog did not render correctly in IE6. It was broken in a major way. The right side bar completely disappears. Ouch!

I needed a way to test my site in Internet Explorer 6 at home, and since I have upgraded all of my PC’s at home to IE7, it seems like it’s a good time to give “virtual appliances” a try.

It took me about an hour to download the Internet Explorer 6 Application Compatibility VPC Image, install it, and have the virtual machine up and running. It helped that I already had Virtual Server installed. Yes Virtual Server works with Virtual PC disk images just fine. The current IE6 image expires on 4/1/2007 but I am sure Microsoft will replace it with another one when the time arrives. There is a blog entry on IEBlog about the image here.

Now I can reproduce the problem on my PC using IE6. That’s going to be the easy part I am afraid.

Update (2/8/2007): I fixed the IE6 problem. Apparently I had some sort of error in my sidebar.php file which messed up the HTML code, causing problems with IE6.