: False positives when testing IE6 in virtual machines I'm a tester for a small organization that creates web applications supporting the full gamut of IE versions. One of my jobs is to ensure
I'm a tester for a small organization that creates web applications supporting the full gamut of IE versions.
One of my jobs is to ensure that the application works well in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. To do this, I have a range of virtual machines and the IE6 testing suite.
The problem is, none of these environments seems 100% reliable. My virtual machines (VirtualPC and VirtualBox) have both thrown me errors that the developer team can't replicate - even when testing native installations.
We've had particular problem when developing for a client of ours who use IE6 exclusively. During field testing, we found our javascript-heavy functionality could throw up bugs in virtual machines which did not appear in real life. IETester can also throw false positives, especially with javascript.
Whilst I have never seen any false negatives, this has still caused us many headaches and wasted a lot of time on bugs that don't really exist.
My question is this: does anyone know if any particular virtualization environment achieves perfect IE6 'emulation', or do I have no choice except to hunt down an old WinXP IE6 box? Has anyone else experienced similar difficulties - if so, how did you work around them?
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A virtual machine running IE6 should run identically to IE6 running on a native machine. A way you could test this is to make a virtual machine out of the physical machine and then try and replicate the issue.
I would image the issues you are experiencing could be down to things like service packs and even hotfixes that could be installed on the machine.
Further to this IE6 handles JavaScript very poorly, which usually puts more stress on the machine, so if your dev is writing on IE6 on a machine with 2GB of RAM and you are testing on a VM with 512MB RAM you might find slightly different issues.
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