I may be a Microsoft fan but I’m not an Edge fan. During a recent ceremonious “let’s audit the functionality in old IE”, I was disappointed to see that I was unable to emulate older versions of Internet Explorer (in addition to being disappointed you can no-longer dock the developer tools). We all thought Internet Explorer was bad but I’m shocked the developer experience got worse.
There’s a better way to check IE in older browers
I’m already a huge fan of virtual machines. Well it turns out that Microsoft offers not-just virtual machines for every version of Internet Explorer from IE6 to Edge, but also on different versions of Windows from XP to to 10, on all major virtualization platforms. This is great because these are the native executables (not just emulated) and the release of Windows they’re running on can sometimes make a big difference when chasing down difficult bugs.
Downloads these virtual machines at https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/windows/.