I recently started using IETester for visual and functional website development testing. While overall a nice product, there is a bug that might grow tiresome. I personally don’t mind. Commercial use might also come at a cost someday.

The Bug

The IETester software uses tabbed browing, as many modern browsers do. The difference is that each tab can be set to render using a different version of Internet Explorer, from version 5.5 through 8, including the system default. After 5-10 minutes of use (or idle), all but the main tab crash. This is not to say the whole program crashes. It is a multiprocess program, which means it can run instances of programs within it; each tabbed window is like it’s own instance of a browser, all hosted within a singular parent application (Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE 7 & 8, and others all use a similar process to render tabs). So, the good news is the whole program doesn’t take a dive. The bad news is you have to refresh the tabs somewhat regularly. Not such a big deal if you’re testing webpages anyhow.

The Potential Cost

IETester is free for personal and commercial use, for now. The company that makes it also produces DebugBar – a web development tool, which is free for personal use, but costs 59€ for commercial implementation after 60 days.That’s currently about $80, American. I would imagine once IETester is out of alpha/beta releases, a similar license would be implemented.

The Conclusion

Even if IETester didn’t have issues, I’d be hesitant to pony up. There are better free alternatives as mentioned in a recent post, including running a legit copy of Windows XP in VirtualBox, Sun’s Virtual Machine. That’s the path I’ll be taking soon, right after I figure out how to share files between host and guest. More on that in a post to come.