Check webdesign in different versions of IE

I am a freelancer web designer and as a web designer I design websites that are cross browser compatible. I know how much of a pain is IE for all web designers. So today I am sharing something that will help some, if not many of the web designers (front end developers).

Earlier I have written about BrowserShots.org which takes the screenshot of how a webpage will look in different browsers and save screenshots of it. But what if we need to take a look at a design which is not live yet? For this, every one including me uses (at least has installed) several of popular browsers like Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, Safari & IE.

IE 7 got smarter and IE 8 is still holding that up. Things will improve in future but what about the people still using IE 6 or previous versions. Earlier I was using Multiple IE (10.3MB) which enables the installation of IE 3 to IE 6 by exploiting a known workaround called DLL redirection. It is no longer maintained but it it still available to download.

Today I found another software named IE Tester (24MB) which is an alpha release but works well till far I used it. It is a web browser of its own which allows you to have the rendering & JavaScript engines of IE 5, IE 6, IE 7 & IE 8. Its equivalent of running different versions of IE at the same time.

Did you find the share useful? What do you use for checking cross browser compatibilities of web designs. Let me know through your valuable comments.