I'm a tester for a small organization that creates web applications supporting the full gamut of IE versions.One of my jobs is to ensure that the application works well in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. To do this, I have a range of virtual machines and the IE6 testing suite.The problem is, none of these environments seems 100% reliable. My virtual machines (VirtualPC and VirtualBox) have both thrown me errors that the developer team can't replicate - even when testing native installations.We've had particular problem when developing for a client of ours who use IE6 exclusively. During field testing, we found our javascript-heavy functionality could throw up bugs in virtual machines which did not appear in real life. IETester can also throw false positives, especially with javascript.Whilst I have never seen any false negatives, this has still caused us many headaches and wasted a lot of time on bugs that don't really exist.My question is this: does anyone know if any particular virtualization environment achieves perfect IE6 'emulation', or do I have no choice except to hunt down an old WinXP IE6 box? Has anyone else experienced similar difficulties - if so, how did you work around them?
False positives when testing IE6 in virtual machines
internet explorer;testing;internet explorer 6