Running Internet Explorer 6 on Mac OS X

Can you run Internet Explorer on a Mac? Can you run Windows on a Mac? Sure. Many by now are aware of Bootcamp and Parallels...But what if you don't want to load an entire operating system just to run Internet Explorer which you are only running to make sure your web page looks the same on all browsers? What then?

Good news. You're not stuck. You can in fact run Internet Explorer 6, 7 and many other Windows executables on your Mac without loading Windows! This cuts out the extra overhead and keeps things running faster. It also doesn't require you to launch Parallels or restart with Bootcamp just for a quick check.

There's a handy project called ies4osx. This uses Darwine, a port of Linux's wine emulator that lets you run Windows applications in Linux. So you actually can run other Windows applications as well.

Where's the catch?
Ok, so there is one. You need an Intel based Mac to do all this. A minor catch. However, after running 3 installers you're pretty much ready to go. You need the X11 terminal (found on your Mac OS X system disk) and then you drag Darwine into your Applications folder and finally you can run the ies4osx installer that will do all the leg work of setting up IE for you -- it even creates shortcuts for you in your Applications folder (that you can throw on your dock).

Is it really Internet Explorer?
Yes. It renders the same. Don't believe me? Look at the screen shot in this article. I compared Internet Explorer on the Mac to Internet Explorer on the PC (running a remote desktop application called VNC). The only slight difference is in resolution between the VNC window and the Mac's resolution.

Why not just use VNC? I suppose you could, but it requires a physical Windows PC machine and the VNC software. It's also slow because you're sending instructions for keyboard/mouse over a network.

Two Worlds Colliding.
Before you start cheering about how wonderful your Mac is...Note that a PC can also run OS X. There's some interesting things out there as the two worlds come closer and closer together. All the hardware is becoming the same. So why wouldn't a Mac be able to run a Windows application? In turn, why wouldn't a PC be able to run Mac applications? Including the operating system on both sides.

Well, PC can run OS X and Mac can run Windows. There's things like the x86 project that is showing us how it's absurd to be forced into software choices based on your hardware choice.

Now if only software started conforming to standards and not just the hardware...