The thorn in the side of all web developers/designers, making its all look the same. While all will agree that Microsoft products cause the problems, IE6 and IE7 to a lesser extent, we have to live with it. Why's and wherefores aside the majority of traffic come from these browsers and unless your John Gruber you've got to live with it.

How to solve this problem, well first off IE6 and 7 are needed to test sites on, while I work on a Mac and I have little inclination to switch to Windows, just because my MacBook look good. I have to work out another way of solving this problem. The Intel Mac saved us all, we could use Parallels or Bootcamp to run Windows, with the aesthetics of Jobsian design. Sorry I don't buy into this, currently my new(late '08) MacBook struggles, LAMP stack, Illustrator, Photoshop, possibly XCode or Eclipse, Mail, Coda... Running a Virtual Machine(VM) on top of all this isn't practical. I can't afford more hardware be it a beefier Mac or a Windows machine. I struggled with borrowing machines for a while but this wasn't working well. Friends got annoyed with me hogging their machines whilst I got frustrated with the delecacies of CSS.

Along came CrossBrowserTesting.com, I like their technical solution to this problem, and the fact you can use it for free. They run multiple Operating systems, multiple service packs and multiple browsers, combined with multiple screen resolutions. People, the possibilities are endless. This is delivered to you, the user, via VNC(Virtual Network Client) to either through your browser or a local client. Usage is assigned in 5 minutes slots, paying customers get priority, subscription customers unlimited access. I like this its an elegant solution to a complex situation for web developers. Suddenly I have all of the combinations I could dream of, at my finger tips. I can test Windows 98, XP, Vista, Ubuntu, MAC OSX, on as many browsers as each platform supports. One downside to this is that there is a lot of information running through the 'pipes' and usage can be a little lagg-y, trying to freeload off this service means that often I am waiting for my place in the queue, and 5 minutes to test in 3 or 4 browsers isn't really enough. I thought I could find a solution to these niggles by replicating, even in part, their solution.

I could run VM's of a local development server that could be spun up as needed, pick the major OS's, Windows and Linux and Bob's my Uncle. XP, Vista, or both?  Multiple versions of Internet Explorer - messy. Licensing it's difficult to get an XP license now, I could go unlicensed, but kids don't do it, its criminal. Then the time, basicly best part of a week. Works out that it would be cheaper to pay the USD19.95 a month and have it unlimited. Who'd of thought it. So, turns out that the CrossBroswerTesting.com guys have thought this through. I'm sure that whilst it would be possible to replicate their set up on one of my local machines, truth is I have better things to do.