Multiple versions of Firefox will happily co-exist on the same machine. However, it’s a good idea to tell each version to use its own separate profile. The process of doing this is relatively simple. I will describe the process for Windows initially and then mention how it differs for Linux and Mac OS X. (more…)
Microsoft’s recent announcement about making a free XP image for VirtualPC available for testing has raised an interesting question. As VirtualPC is available for Windows 2000 users (and XP is not) does this mean that Windows 2000 users can now download the free Windows XP image for testing that Microsoft has made available and upgrade the bundled IE6 to IE7 and therefore be able to legally test IE7 under XP from a Win2k machine without needing to buy a separate XP licence?
If this is the case this would be great news for companies that don’t want to upgrade to XP or Vista any time soon but do need to test their websites under IE7.
Any experiences with this please leave your comments
UPDATE: Reading some articles in Slashdot it appears that the WinXP virtual image does not validate as ‘Genuine Windows’ so will not allow installation of IE7 on the image. So it looks like the only way to install IE7 on this image would be to bypass the WGA verification. Of course doing that would be of questionable legality.
As many know testing different versions of IE can be a pain, there’s no supported way to run two versions side by side (people have done it, but Microsoft don’t recommend it and can’t guarantee accuracy of results). Their reccomended way was to run another instance of XP in Virtual PC, Microsoft have made Virtual PC free as they’re competing with VMware in the virtualisation market, however XP is not free and so to legally use this solution you needed another XP licence. A rather expensive solution just to test one browser.
Microsoft have now decided to make it free and slightly easier, they’re producing time limited images of XP with IE6 installed for Virtual PC, this means that you and legally run XP within a virtual machine for IE6 testing purposes while having IE7, Firefox, Opera, etc installed on your primary machine. The draw back is that this image is time bombed and will expire in April 2007, however, Microsoft plan to keep releasing updates to this image. I guess the idea is to make it too inconvenient to use this image for anything other than browser testing, if the image did not expire then people could use it for whatever they wanted and in effect get a free XP licence. So it’s not 100% perfect solution, but it’s a major improvement so it will make the lives easier of many web developers and testers.
Mozilla Developer News is reporting that the tree has been closed for 1.9a1. Gecko 1.9 will power the back end for Firefox 3 and other Gecko based products such as Thunderbird and Camino. New alpha builds will be produced approximately every 6 weeks. This alpha is concentrating on the Gecko backend so will have no differences to the Firefox frontend over version 2.0.
Firefox is the main utiliser of Gecko technology but is not the only one, so it’s important to note that this alpha release is not a Firefox alpha but any Gecko alphas you download will be using the Firefox frontend as a means of testing the underlying Gecko technology. This release is not intended for general consumption and should be avoided unless you’re a Mozilla developer or tester (or interested in getting involved), or a web developer interesting in how their sites display under this rendering engine.
In the coming weeks we’ll be looking at what’s expected of Gecko 1.9 and how that’s expected to relate to Firefox 3. Please note that project Tamarin that was mentioned previously is not planned for Gecko 1.9, it is planned for 2.0 (aka Mozilla 2) which will be a major overhaul of the Gecko engine.