Seems like the only reason I fire up my emulation software is to visit a site that can only be viewed with Internet Explorer. It takes a while to get Parallels Desktop up and running. When I do, my CPU gets hammered. This makes any sort of multi-tasking a sure fire way to obtain the spinning rainbow beach ball of death. However, today I saw on TUAW that Internet Explorer has returned to the Mac via ies4osx.
Now there’s another option for Intel Mac owners: ies4osx, a Mac port of the ies4linux package. Built on top of the Darwine version of the Wine Win32 API translation layer, ies4osx downloads and installs an official version of IE (you pick from v5, 5.5, 6 or 7) and then runs it inside the X11 environment on your Mac.
The resulting browser looks a little weird — almost like a Bizarro version of IE, with the slightly altered type and menu look of the X11 windowing system — but this bear can dance. OWA runs nicely, with full rich-text editing and message search, and the administration pages for MS Virtual Server also work pretty well. I wouldn’t depend on ies4osx in a production role, at least not with the current build, but for one-off testing of websites in IE it’s worth the (free) download. The ies4linux developer plans to roll the Mac-specific fixes back into the main package, so the next version of ies4 will probably support both Mac and Linux users from the same codebase.
Read the instructions on the page (you need to download Darwine in order to run ies4osx). You can read the full TUAW article here.
Update: After using this for an hour I can say that it works. It is still a very CPU intensive program but not quite as much heavy lifting as Parallels. It is also a bit wonky but it is the first build.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Software for the Law Office. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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