by Aaron Froehlich

After Parallels died on me earlier this week, I went looking for a quick and easy way to install a new set of Windows virtual machines on my Mac. Ievms via xdissent  makes it stupid simple to get a testing environment up and running in minutes.

After downloading Oracle's VirtualBox, you can install the version of IE you want using one simple command: curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="8" bash

Half an hour later you have a clean and patched virtual environment ready for cross-browser debugging.

Update:

If you're looking to access your local development environment from Windows, VirtualBox provides an easy way to access localhost at 10.0.2.2. You can access that directly in Internet Explorer (e.g. http://10.0.2.2:3000), or by adding an entry to the Windows hosts file at C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts:

10.0.2.2 mydomain.dev