It’s a saga, or at least it felt like a saga and one that involves virtual machines. It began when a friend, who is developing a neat piece of photographic software for the PC asked me to run it in a virtual machine on the Mac. I happened to have parallels, so I downloaded his software and ran it and, wouldn’t-you-have-guessed, it blew – and it was running on a clean (almost never been used before) version of XP.

Now I don’t have any real interest in VMs on the Mac, because why would I want to run another OS? But my friend insisted that I needed to get VMware and even proposed the theory that VMware was a much more mature technology and his neat piece of software (and it really is neat) would surely work OK, with that. So I did.

Comparing Virtual Machines

If you want my opinion, I’d be inclined to go for VMware ahead of Parallels because the interface is a little better. But the difference is marginal – nothing to write blogs about. Now, I have yet to try his software on Windows-on-VMware-under-OS X, because he’s creating a new Alpha version. But this was the weekend when I decided to sort out my blog in respect of other browsers than FireFox.

I have been lax about this, and my excuse is that the original WordPress theme I used worked fine in different browsers. However, this is an excuse, and a pathetic one at best, because I’ve pretty much re-architected the whole theme. The truth is that I’ve only checked the site in Safari and FireFox and occasionally in Opera (but Opera rarely ever has a problem with anything.)

So I checked my web site in IE7 and it was pretty much a mess. It looked like someone had driven across it with a lawn-mower. I actually have no idea how long it has been like that, but I expect it’s several weeks, while I’ve been hastily developing navigation. So I apologize to anyone who visited and failed to appreciate the random collage that the site exhibited under IE7. And then I looked at it in IE6 and, of course, it was worse.

In case you’re wondering whether I used VMware or Parallels to run IE6 and IE7 the answer is:

No, not at first.

I have 4 IE emulators that work under X-Windows and I began by using the two that do IE6 emulation and IE7 emulation. But they are not the best software in the world and after a while I got sick of them “flashing at me” as they do. So I decided instead to load Windows onto VMware and run IE7 from there. And that was fine fro IE7. But I’d downloaded IE7 as an upgrade so I no longer had IE6. So I loaded another virtual machine with Windows XP  and this time I didn’t load IE7.

(btw, it was reasonably easy to fix my web site for IE7. I say this, because I pretty soon discovered that IE6 is one of the worst, if not the worst, web site rendering engines ever. It’s like a defective supermarket trolley that just doesn’t go in the direction you push it. To call it awful, would be to furnish it with a great compliment. It makes ‘merely awful’ seem adequate.)

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