Asinen likes Intel Linux Graphics

Intel Linux Graphics

IE on Linux

The information below is believed to be accurate but is provided with absolutely no guarantee or warranty, either express or implied. If you use any of the information that follows you do so entirely at your own risk.

No, I haven't gone crazy. I'm not suggesting for a moment that you should use Internet Explorer on Linux for fun. Quite apart from any issues you might have with using Internet Explorer on any platform (an imperfect security record, limited support for W3C standards, unwanted pop-ups - well, you've probably got your own list) there's the fact you have to run it under Wine.

Internet Explorer logoBut the fact is that - despite losing market share to Firefox, amongst others - Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser on the dominant operating system. If, like me, you do web design but don't do Windows that leaves you with a problem. Using standards compliant code gives you a website that, with a little tweaking works in most browsers, but there's no telling what Internet Explorer is going to do. The only reliable way to see what IE's going to make of your pages is to run it.

Fortunately, those clever people behind the Wine project are rather adept at making Windows software work on Linux. But IE's close interdependence on the Windows operating system brings some complications - you need a lot more than iexplore.exe to run Internet Explorer successfully. Fortunately there are tools to do the hard work for you. WineTools allows you to install IE and other Windows software (if you really want to). However, it doesn't seem to play very happily with Wine versions newer than the 20041019 version.

This causes problems if like me you're running a distro (SuSE 9.3 in my case) that comes with a newer version of Wine that doesn't work with WineTools for installing IE. I couldn't find an RPM for the older version of Wine on SuSE and the prospect of compiling the source didn't fill me with joy. That's when I found IEs 4 Linux which is an extremely funky shell script that works with a whole load of versions of Wine across many distros. You just answer one question (do you want IE5, 5.5, 6 or all three - to test your site for maximum compatibility you'd surely use all three) and it does the rest. And you don't have to install any other unnecessary stuff like Media Player or Outlook Express.

I really can't recommend IEs 4 Linux highly enough, so in a moment I'm going to link to it again to make up for that. If you want to use IE on Linux then IEs 4 Linux is, in my view, simply the best solution. You should of course keep in mind that doing this legally requires you to own a properly licensed version of Windows.