Just a quick question,

Does the conditional comments not work in the new IE8, even when you emulate IE7?

<!--[if IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="stylesie.css" />
<![endif]-->

I can't get it to work whatsoever, i've even tried <!--[if IE 8]>

One thing I've noticed on my machine is that even if you have several versions of IE installed they all identify themselves as the same version. I think it's how things are recorded in the registry.

For example I have IE7 and IE6 installed. When I view something in IE6 the browser does respond like iE6, but it requires <!--[if IE7]> in order for the conditional to work.

Check to see how your IE is identifying itself. Just look under Help => About in the menu. My guess is both browsers are identifying themselves as the same version.

IE8 is still in BETA, so I don't see the point here. It's also stated that when IE 8 is finally released, it will be standards compliant, eliminating the need for conditional comments (at least we HOPE so!) to 'correct' IE's historical bad behavior.

@vangogh: You can remove the registry key that identifies the browser version, and then the standalone browsers will revert to internal methods to identify what it is. Here is a tutorial that I used once upon a time: http://www.positioniseverything.net/...s/multiIE.html

I have found, however, that having multiple IE browsers on one computer is unreliable, at best, and I now test on two computers.

Thanks Abel. I figured IE was getting the info from the registry, but wasn't sure if it was something to mess with. The tutorial is bookmarked for the weekend.

I agree testing on multiple computers is best, but not it's not likely until I shell out for another computer. How unreliable to you find having multiple IEs is? What kind of things fail to work?

Well, I found that the second browser (mine was a hacked version of IE6) was fragile when there was a complex site, causing it to break down in a way that didn't make sense. Although this only happened twice to me, it confused me a lot when I was trying to debug for IE6. I'm not sure what the problem was, but when it happened again I deleted the standalone and converted my laptop to an IE6 computer.

There is also a special .dll file that has to be added to the standalone folder to allow the application to react to cookies. I needed cookie functionality because I was working on a user-login based web application at the time, which relied on cookies. Maybe the .dll file made it unstable, it's hard for me to say because I don't know much about that.

It definitely was very handy for a while. I could go into any coffee shop with only a laptop and do all of my testing without using browsershot websites, which are all pretty slow it seems anyway.

I do all of my work from home now, so having two computers is normal for me. Like anything, when something is a hack it doesn't always perform as well, but sometimes it can be handy.

Thanks for the info. I like having multiple browsers on the one computer. I mostly work from home, but it's just easier having everything on one machine.

I hadn't realized that about needing the .dll file to react to cookies. I guess it's something to look into. It probably won't be an issue for me, but good to know about nonetheless.

Eventually I'm hoping to have a few more computers around of various shapes, sizes, and OSs.