After spending the last two articles extolling the virtues of Mac OSX, it seems only fitting to devote one article to discussing the stuff it lacks. From a web designer’s point-of-view, there’s one huge hole in switching completely to a Mac, that you are obligated to rectify immediately.
Yes, I’m talking about Internet Explorer. No, I’m not crazy. The browser that everyone loves to hate is arguably the most important piece of software in a web designer’s toolkit. Think about it: you can live without Photoshop, Dreamweaver or Flash; there are always alternatives to those applications. But there’s only one IE, and it deserves your attention (if not your respect).
So how does one go about getting IE to work on a Mac? A few years back, you could actually get IE compiled specifically for the PowerPC-based Macs, but that rabble-rouser of an app is long gone (not to mention that it was too "unique" in its bugginess to be very useful as a testing tool).
What you really need is Windows-based IE6, which currently accounts for at least 55% of the global browser population, and for that, you’ve got 3 major options:
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BootCamp. The only official Apple product on this list is also the only one that actually requires you to reboot your machine every time you want to switch operating systems (hence the name). Bootcamp is a free product that allows you to partition your hard drive and install a full version of Windows on it, as well as all the various doohickeys that XP comes bundled with.
In practice, this is a bit of a bitch to do. The trade-off is that it allows you to devote 100% of your machine’s resources to Windows, meaning that there is practically no performance penalty at all to this approach. (Both of the proceeding options will result in slower overall performance, so if you are looking to do some gaming on your Mac, or some hardcore Photoshop, Bootcamp might be the solution for you.)
The disadvantages include the aforementioned reboots, and the fact that you will have difficulty sharing files between your Mac partition and your Windows one. The decision to format your Windows partition using either FAT32 or NTFS will have a big impact here, as MacOS can read/write to the former, but only read from the latter. To make the decision even more complicated, FAT32 can only support partition sizes of 30gb or less, so you will be working with a fairly cramped drive if you are looking to do some design work on Windows.
In truth, I had a hard time even considering the Bootcamp option as I would have to maintain two Ruby interpreters, two PHP engines, two MySQL servers, etc., etc., to be able to test my websites on both MacOS and Windows, and the prospect of going through all that hassle was a bit too much.
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Parallels. Here’s the option I eventually went with, after comparing the various choices. Running Parallels is very much like running the Matrix — XP doesn’t know that it’s actually trapped inside Mac hardware, and proceeds to live its life without realizing that it’s literally Windows in a window.
Once you’ve got Parallels installed, all you have to do is define the specifications of your virtual machine (how much memory, how much hard drive space, what kind of network adapter it has), and then proceed to install whatever OS you want. It currently supports everything from Windows 95 to ZetaOS, which is pretty darned cool.
Unlike Bootcamp, where you actually have to allot a certain amount of hard drive space to the Windows partition, Parallels only consumes the space as needed. In other words, it doesn’t matter how much hard-drive space you define during installation, because Parallels resizes the virtual machine file dynamically (it just makes Windows think it has access to a drive of such-and-such size). Obviously this file will slowly grow as you accumulate data, but it doesn’t create dead space the way Bootcamp would. Currently, my entire Windows virtual machine is sitting pretty at 2.1gb of file space, which is smaller than most modern games.
The most impressive thing about Parallels is how easily you can share files between OSX and the guest operating system. You could quite literally drag stuff from your OSX desktop onto the Windows desktop. In technological terms, this seemingly simple gesture is a hell of a feat.
In terms of networking, Parallels actually makes Windows believe that it’s a standalone computer in a workgroup with another Mac close by, so it just treats it like it would any other network neighbour. That means that you can define shared folders on your Mac that the Windows virtual machine can read from and write data to.
The reason why I chose Parallels was because I needed to be able to view the websites running on my Mac in IE6, look for errors, go back and edit the code, view the revisions, then repeat the process. Obviously, it would be impossible to do this using the Bootcamp method because I would have to reboot each time.
Parallels does have some limitations however, although for our purposes, they are not hugely relevant. It’s unlikely that you will be able to get things like your Macbook’s webcam working within your virtual machine, or its built-in Bluetooth adapter. You also will not be able to burn anything with the SuperDrive, as all Windows can see is a read-only CD/DVD-ROM. You will, however, be able to surf the web without much tweaking, as it will assume that your Mac’s internet connection is its bridge to the Internet. The other limitation is that Parallels will only devote one of your two processors to the virtual machine, so running hefty applications like the almighty Photoshop is not going to be very advantageous.
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CrossOver. Linux users will already be familiar with the technology on which CrossOver is based; it’s called Wine, and it’s allowed *nix afficionados to use mainstream apps like Microsoft Office for years now. Of our 3 options, CrossOver is the one that involves the least amount of headache, because you don’t even have to install Windows to get near-Windows-like functionality. Wine essentially clones the Windows framework, allowing it to run Windows-only apps on any Unix-based system (a version of CrossOver is available for both Linux and Mac).
What’s the catch? Wine is a work in progress, and is far from perfect. One would argue that it’s impossible to make a perfect copy of an imperfect original, but ultimately, it means that the products you run via Wine are not going to be 100% stable. It also means that not every Windows application is supported by CrossOver (there’s a growing list of every application it does support here).
After running CrossOver’s svelte 28mb installer, you will be asked to choose which Windows applications you want to run. IE6 is fairly straightforward to install because it’s free to download and CrossOver actually handles the whole process automatically (including a simulated reboot at the end — nifty!). Other applications will require that you provide a CD or an installation folder for CrossOver to take the files from.
From my brief experiment using IE6 via CrossOver, I have to say that I wasn’t very impressed with the overall experience. The CrossOver site warns that their IE6 port was still a bit unstable, and although it didn’t crash during my test runs, it was both slow and rendered pages unreliably … that is, more unreliably than what you’d normally expect from standard IE6.
Ultimately, this solution doesn’t give a web designer the stable testing environment that he needs to solve browser compatibility issues and thus, isn’t something I can really recommend. On the other hand, it is a veritable no-brainer to install and start using CrossOver, and should be enough if you’re only using it to debug HTML and CSS. (Anything with a lot of Javascript — Gmail, Yahoo!Mail Beta, Basecamp, etc — gave me a real headache.)
As stated above, Parallels is my weapon-of-choice for getting IE running on the new Intel-Macs. It costs US$70 plus the Windows license, so it’s also the most expensive choice, but it’s the only one that fits all our various requirements.