Guy's Blog Blog from April, 2009

If you use a modern operating system on your computer, like OS X or Linux, you'll be familiar with the term "web browser". Modern web browsers can accurately render and process documents on the internet very quickly, so there's no need to use a preview tool. Many modern phones (Android, iPhone, etc) and even music players (iPod Touch) now include web browsers, allowing accurate rendering of web pages on a hand held device.

However, there are still lots of people who use the old Windows operating system, in particular the XP version which was released about 10 years ago. Unfortunately, rather than providing a web browser for the Windows platform, Microsoft chose to bundle a basic preview tool called Internet Explorer. While this allows users to see a basic view of pages on the interent, you don't see the full quality document, just an approximation of what it looks like.

As a basic preview tool, Explorer isn't bad. The real problem, however, is that most Windows users (and there are millions of them) actually use it to browse the internet - something it was never designed for. As a result, web developers have to spend a great deal of time making their pages work in the preview tool - time that could be better spent elsewhere.

To give you an idea of why this process is so wasteful, look a the screen shots below...

First, this is what the web page looks like in a web browser:

And here's what it looks like in the basic Explorer preview:

As you can see, it's far more basic and there are lots of visual glitches. Fixing the visual glitches is a tedious process because there aren't any proper developer tools for the preview tool – you generally need to resort to trial and error, which is very time consuming and demotivating.

As such, after a week of additional work, little progress had been made:

Bear in mind this is still a work in progress, however you can see that some improvement has been made to the tabs and links, however it's still nothing like the first image taken in a proper web browser.

Roughly 20% to 40% of the development time for any web design project is spent trying to make things look "less worse" in Microsoft's preview tool. Even after spending all that time, the end result still looks terrible compared to what you get in a proper web browser from the outset.

I still love web development, but like all web developers/designers I loathe the wasteful "make it work in a preview tool" phase. There's loads of excellent web browsers available for Windows, such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera - why Microsoft don't bundle one of these browsers and ditch their quick preview tool (which, ironically, is slower than all the web browsers!), I have no idea. Ah, well, another week and we should have the remaining glitches ironed out for Internet Explorer users...

If you need to run multiple operating systems in virtual machines on your Apple Mac, I highly recommend Parallels Desktop...

For $79 USD, Parallels Desktop makes creating, installing and running virtual machines a trivial task - so trivial even I could do it without reading any instructions!

To create a VM, pop in the installation CD (or use an ISO disk image) for your desired operating system (eg. Windows install disc) and create a new virtual machine with it. It's really that simple!

So far, I've installed Windows XP (for testing websites in IE6), gOS and xubuntu (two flavours of Linux to play with). It's quite strange seeing entire operating systems running happily on my Mac desktop:

One of Parallels most awesome features is it's ability to run Windows in "coherence" mode. It's probably easier to explain with a screen shot (click to zoom):

Yep, that's right, you can run Windows apps on your Mac desktop as if they were just normal Mac apps! You can also share folders between the Mac and other operating systems and you can even share the clipboard between Windows and the Mac!

For more info, head over to the Parallels Desktop website, they've got a video tour on there which shows Parallels in action.