<p>I want to test the web pages I create in all the modern versions of Internet Explorer (6, 7 and 8 beta) but I work mainly on a Mac and often don't have direct access to a PC.</p>

Update:
Microsoft now provide virtual machine images for various versions of IE that are ready to use on all of the major OS X virtualisation platforms (
VirtualBox
,
VMWare Fusion
, and
Parallels
).
Download the appropriate image from:
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/
On an Intel based Mac you can run Windows within a virtual machine. You will need one virtual machine for each version of IE you want to test against.
The instructions below include free and legal virtualisation software and Windows disk images.
Download some virtual machine software. The developer disk images we're going to use are will work with either
VMWare Fusion
or
Sun Virtual Box
. VMWare has more features but costs $80, Virtual Box on the other hand is more basic but is free for most users (see
Virtual Box licensing FAQ
for details).
Download the IE developer disk images, which are free from Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...
Extract the disk images using
cabextract
which is available from
MacPorts
or as source code (Thanks to
Clinton
).
Download Q.app from
http://www.kju-app.org/
and put it in your /Applications folder (you will need it to convert the disk images into a format VMWare/Virtual Box can use)
At this point, the process depends on which VM software you're using.
Virtual Box users
Open a Terminal.app on your Mac (you can find it in /Applications/Utilities) and run the following sequence of commands, replacing
input.vhd
with the name of the VHD file you're starting from and
output.vdi
with the name you want your final disk image to have:
```
```
/Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert -O raw -f vpc "input.vhd" temp.bin
VBoxManage convertdd temp.bin "output.vdi"
rm temp.bin
mv "output.vdi" ~/Library/VirtualBox/VDI/
VBoxManage modifyvdi "output.vdi" compact
```
```
Start Virtual Box and create a new virtual machine
Select the new VDI file you've just created as the boot hard disk
VMWare fusion users
Open a Terminal.app on your Mac (you can find it in /Applications/Utilities) and run the following commands, replacing
input.vhd
and
output.vmdk
with the name of the VHD file you're working on and the name you want your resulting disk image to have:
```
```
/Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert -O vmdk -f vpc "input.vhd" "output.vmdk"
mv "output.vmdk" ~/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/
```
```
This will probably take a while (It takes around 30 minutes per disk image on my 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook w/ 2Gb RAM).
Start VMWare Fusion and create a new virtual machine
In the advanced disk options select "use and existing disk" and find the VMDK file you just created