Render pages in IE without IE

If you are involved in Web development in any way there is usually a point in the timeline of a project where you want to see what our dear Internet Explorer is doing with the pages that have worked just fine in your browser of choice and even for the W3C’s validators. Well, if you happen to be using a non-Windows platform chances are that you don’t have an IE at hand – let alone different versions.

NetRenderer to the rescue! The German company GEOTEK offers a service that renders Web pages on the fly in IE 5.5, 6 or 7 as PNGs. So there is almost no need for VirtualPC/Parallels/etc anymore. While you will only see the upper 740 pixels of the page in question and are not able to interact with it you can still check if positioning and basic styles work out fine. Very handy i must say. Something i have looked for for quite some time.

You can make it even more handy if you are using things like Sogudi for Safari or Firefox’s Quick Search. Typing “ie http://www.anarchitect.org” into the addressbar would then show the page at NetRenderer as rendered by IE.