The Past…
The majority of the development I did in the past was on a PC running Microsoft Windows, mainly XP Pro. As a default set of development tools, I would have the newest version of the different available browsers including Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. This was a great setup for testing in the latest and greatest browser versions but did nothing for testing in those older versions that the majority of the Web population were using. I explored many different avenues to fulfill my testing obligations and came up with a variety of solutions. None were optimal but they served their purpose. I initially had an older PC that I used only for testing purposes that had older versions of IE, Opera, Netscape and Firefox. This worked to a point but was a real pain switching amongst multiple machines just to do testing. I started using standalone versions of IE from evolt.org but this did nothing for testing in other browsers. There were a few online services that provided you with a screenshot of your page running in a variety of browsers and versions. This was good, but all it showed you was a picture – you can’t easily develop from that. There had to be a better way but I had not found it. But then…