AlternateIdea: Making Firefox Mac Behave Like IE 6

October 5th, 2005

Making Firefox Mac Behave Like IE 6

27 comments on 466 words

Say What! Yes, thats the idea behind this post. If it was possible to make FF (or Safari for that matter) behave like IE 6 via some plugin mechanism or with the help of Grease Monkey; Think of how easy cross-platform browser compatibility testing would be?

If Dean Edwards can make IE6 behave like a standards compliant browser then how come we can’t reverse that effect and make Firefox or Safari behave like a non-standards browser.

The problem I have with browser compatibility testing sites are that they are not instantaneous, nor do I expect them to be. I like to make quick changes, refresh and see if what I did corrected the problem I might have had. If we had a development tool like I’m proposing then it could save us mounds of time and keep us sane. From my understanding, my website is currently looking a little funky in IE 6 right now and I’d like to get that fixed. :-)

Making it happen

We can kick around the idea for days on end, but until we actually have a tool like this we are no better now than we we’re before you started reading this post.

Here is what I propose: First find someone or some people who are skilled enough and up to the task; second, we set up an account on fundable.org to collect some funds in order to reimburse them for there enormous contribution to the community and the time they will spend on development. I’m sure there are enough Mac users out there who would shell out a few bucks for a tool like this. Even those using Firefox for Windows could benefit from a tool such as this.

The developers would have to release this under an MIT style license.

So–Am I crazy and would you reinforce that notion by donating to the developers?

Discussion

bruce said on October 5th

Software to emulate bugs? I’d rather donate money towards a fund that promoted Safari/Firefox amongst Mac users… I constantly come across OSX users who are still using IE just because they have no idea what ‘Safari’ means.

ps. your live preview is extremely distracting.. it’s slow to update and pushes the comment form down the page.
Justin Palmer said on October 5th

Bruce, Thanks for the reply; however, You missed the point of the article. I am not trying to promote Safari or Firefox, I am trying to emulate IE 6 for the Mac so that we can do compatibility testing without having to own a Windows machine or use services such as Browser Cam.

IE 6 doesn’t exists for the Mac; however, it dominates about 90% of the browser market and when Mac users create a website, especially for a client whose target audience is compromised of primarily IE 6 users, we have to make sure our designs work well in IE 6. Currently the only means of doing that is to either a) Own a Windows machine, or b) Use a service such as Browser Cam.

In regards to the Live preview, I agree with you on that and it’s something I’ll be taking care of real soon.
james said on October 5th

This thought has crossed my mind as well. If this was attainable it’d be nice to see a web-developer-specific browser with capabilities of multiple engines, including replications of IE 5.x Win, IE 6, netscape, opera, and safari. Using the macs graphical features it’d interesting to be able to overlay two different renderings to see differences and such. A bit of rambling there but you can see where im going…
lucie said on October 5th

This is indeed something web designers on Mac sorley need. Coding on one machine and then testing your stuff on another machine for niggly tweaks, (and to accommodate a crappy browser), is way too time consuming and irritating.

I think your idea of essentially employing people for this task is good way to actually get it started.
bruce said on October 5th

Ah, I see what you’re getting at.

I suspect it’s a lot harder than you think. Even things like gamma levels and fonts are different between PC and Mac… they’re not really fixable via JavaScript.

Couldn’t you just run Virtual PC?
Dustin Diaz said on October 5th

I would try my best to make a call out to the Mac community as best as possible. Something like this isn’t terribly useful for anyone that has easy access (or everyday access) to a windows machine. Even if I did have the plugin to make Firefox (in windows) to make it work like IE, I still think it would be faster to just use IE.

But hey, this is still a wonderful idea and I think you can get a lot of support now that there is the power of greasemonkey to do it.
lucie said on October 5th

Bruce, we are really more concerned with layout, CSS and javascript. The gamma and typeface differences aren’t what we want to test. Most of us specify fonts that are ether widely installed on both OS-es, or specfiy a few typefaces as an alternative, or just whatever the user has selected as default. (Sorry I think I’ve veered of the topic.)

I have not tried Virtual PC before so I can’t comment on it’s performance, but having to run some software that then goes and runs a whole new OS on top of OSX does seem clunky and convoluted.

To me, being able to use a plug-in or extension in Firefox seems easier and quicker to use.
Justin Palmer said on October 6th

Bruce—As lucie suggested, we are primarily concerned with rendering issues related to CSS. Gamma levels and fonts are the least of my worries. I want to know if my header renders as my footer, my content overlaps my sidebar, my navigation is tucked away under another element; Issues such as this are what plague us the most.

Paying $149.00 for Virtual PC defeats the purpose of having an open source, easily installable, in-browser tool.

Your getting warmer on the idea, but your still just a tad bit off ;-).
Dean Edwards said on October 6th

I’ve kinda done this too:

http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2005/03/ie-emulator/ http://dean.edwards.name/moz-behaviors/
Justin Palmer said on October 6th

Dean, I wasn’t aware of your other scripts, however after giving them a run they don’t seem to have any effect on this site or the bug examples on Position is Everything. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe your scripts emulate the ie DOM and not it’s CSS rendering issues?
nurbs said on October 6th

Yeah, please do this! VirtualPC is intolerably slow even on a dual-G5.
B. Lee said on October 6th

Choo-choo, it’s the clue train, last stop: you
L. Huxley said on October 6th

Okaay… From the top: it took people long enough to isolate, identify and remedy some of the rendering problems in IE. Now you also want people to emulate these …things in another browser to save yourself some deskspace or a license fee?

Provided one can actually come close to mimicking some of the more disturbing rendering glitches, one would also have to emulate the rememdies/fixes/hacks that work for these. Yeek.

You’d never be able to fully emulate the way IE kludges up your work. That in itself defeats the purpose of doing this.
Phil said on October 6th

Here’s what I do since IE6 won’t work on Linux: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/

If you have a Mac, you could set up a crap PC (P2 or even P1 would work fine), put Linux on it, run IE through the above package, and X-forward it to your Mac. Piece of cake. =D

Ok, maybe it’s not simple, but it would be fast and accurate. I think it would be nice to have a Firefox plugin, but I wouldn’t trust it to emulate all the nastiness of IE since there are just so many bugs.

Also, I would hate to think that someone would have to go through the miserable task of spending enough time in IE to really understand its deficiencies. Their poor, poor mind would never be the same.
Justin Palmer said on October 6th
@Phil: I never said it would be easy ;-)

@L. Huxley: This isn’t about I_, it’s about _us—Mac users. I’m not looking to just save a quick buck on a license fee; It’s the collective benefits of the entirety of the particulars that interest me:
- The Ability to do it.
- The ease of use
- The fact that I don’t have to purchase nor install any other software.
- The challenge to see if it could be done
- It’s open source
- The community effort and collaboration
- Nothing but sunshine and rainbows from here on out
Jamie Poitra said on October 6th

I’ve always thought an IE specific emulator was an interesting idea. Something tailered specifically to the IE 5, 5.5 and 6 that only emulates what is necessary. The idea being to not emulate a whole PC which would hopefully make the emulation much faster.
Jacob said on October 6th

Netscape 8 includes both the latest Gecko render engine and IE6’s trident rendering engine. NS8 probably has a mac or PC, or linux version available and should be able to emulate adequately for testing. Maybe not an ideal solution… but.
lucie said on October 6th

Dammit! Netscape 8 is not available for linux or mac yet. The release notes also say that you need Internet Explorer 6.0 (If using the Trident rendering engine). So even if/when NS8 comes out for mac, it probably won’t have this feature.
Dean Edwards said on October 7th

Justin – yes, my scripts emulate the DOM not other inconsistencies. It sticks in my gut somehow to emulate rendering bugs. ;-)
Veracon said on October 7th

I can’t really help you, but please don’t just make it for Macintosh. Many people (including me) don’t like buying either Macintosh software and hardware or Windows software.
L. Huxley said on October 8th

You seem especially keen to disassociate your own benefit in this, while “The fact that I don’t have to purchase nor install any other software” spells another story. You want an easy way in, and you are talking about the Mordor of browsers here.

Next off, Lee was right about the choo-choo remark: you still don’t seem to understand the implications of what you’re suggesting. Nice checklist, though.

Internet Explorer for Windows is closed-source and broken in regards to the standards. No matter how close you might get to the erratic behaviour of, say, the guillotine bug or the wonderful, erratic flaws in the visual formatting model of IE, you would never get to the point where you could conveniently test a page with your “Holy Grail” without having to test it in the real deal in the end. These are irrevocable flaws, not something you can just restyle in a convenient way.

Besides, IE7 is on the horizon. We might want to focus on whatever that might pose to developers first.
Justin Palmer said on October 8th

L. Huxley: I’m in no way trying to disassociate my own benefit, I could benefit greatly from a tool like this. You quoted me out of context, but yeah…

I understand perfectly what I’m asking and I’m not suggesting it’s a one day job, or could ever be a full implementation. You seem to be taking this post a little more serious than my intentions. It was a toss up to test interest in the idea and to get constructive feedback on the topic.

If before Dean decided to emulate IE’s DOM bugs and then find ways to make IE behave like a standards compliant browser; I’m sure he was probably deemed crazy by more than a few.

The fact of the matter is that I know it’s not a walk in the park; It probably could never be a full implementation; I have reasonable expectations, but pessimism gets us no where.

IE 7 is on the horizon, but it will be years before we can forget about IE 6. IE 7 is not the short term answer to IE 6’s problems.

Cheers
Eric said on November 30th

You know you’d have a better chance getting something like Darwine than getting an IE plugin for Firefox. Not to mention it would be useful in other ways besides just emulating an old browser.

http://darwine.opendarwin.org/

I am looking for the same thing though.
underwaterguy said on December 19th

I can’t believe the negativity up in here. I think this is a fabulous idea. I thought of the same thing this weekend, but I was thinking more along the lines of swapping out the entire rendering engine, not trying to emulate anything with javascript.

If nothing else, it should be possible to make a version of Firefox that can switch between the 1.5 engine and the 1.0 engine and everything before it.

I’d assume that the first run of an application like this would only catch some percentage of the bugs. But, that alone would be useful, and as more people use it, it will get easier to collect and implement the bugs since you have more people testing it in the field.
Miki said on February 23rd

I agree, we Mac users really do need an IE emulation tool. I have just spent 4 days trying to resurrect 3 old pc’s into soomething that works just so I can test a site in ie! Crazy or wot! I could go and buy a pc but hey i dont want to waste my money on dead technology, i could try virtual pc, actually i have, it’s really slow. Help!
Ck said on March 16th

Using an Intel-based Mac may help to run XP on a Windows emulator for very little and at almost full PC speed. I saw a demonstration on a web site of this and the cost of that emulation was only $30. Using such a setup may help to test the web pages in the real application. The expensive part of this is getting the new Intel Mac of course and maybe XP too. I think Mac OS 9 is another OS that can be emulated for a one-stop-shop of all varieties of web browsers out there. The emulation for Windows was Bochs for PPC systems and it had another name for Intel Macs.
Royal Irish Lion said on April 21st

For some reason, it took out my connectors for the footnote at the bottom..

So, **Yes, I know…. (etc)

Sorry, comments are closed for this article.

Justin is the Design Director for entp, the company behind Lighthouse, Warehouse, and Mephisto. You can check out his dated portfolio for a peek of what he's done.

Beautifully simple issue tracking and project management. With a beautiful Mac-like interface, email and subversion integration, Lighthouse is the perfect project management tool. We took the suck out of issue tracking.

Oct10

Best Practices For Cocoa and CocoaTouch—Invaluable tips from Cocoa developers.
permalink
Sep25

Track House And Senate Votes On Twitter. I’ve put together a small script that parses vote data collected by Govtrack.us and posts to twitter.
permalink
Jul28
permalink
Protip: Color grep searches in terminal
```
alias grep='GREP_COLOR="1;37;41" LANG=C grep --color=auto'
```
Stash this away in your Z Shell (~/.zshenv) or Bash environment (~/.bashrc) and set your preferred ANSI code.
Jun08

ActiveRecord Ported To Objective-C brought to us by Ninja Kitten
permalink
May06

With the release of Opera’s DragonFly, IE 8’s Developer tools, Safari’s/Webkit’s Web Inspector and Drosera; and the Grand Daddy of them all, Firebug – we’ve now come full circle.
permalink

Feb08

permalink

DoubleClick and Define using Apple Dictionary


var selection;
if(window.getSelection)
  selection = window.getSelection();
else if(document.selection)
  selection = document.selection.createRange();

document.observe("dblclick", function() {
  if(navigator.userAgent.include("Macintosh")) {
      location.href = "dict://" + selection;
    }
});

A quick (and probably dirty) Prototype-based hack allowing Mac users to get the definition of any word by double clicking it.

Feb08

permalink

A strftime for Prototype


Object.extend(Date.prototype, {
  strftime: function(format) {
    var day = this.getUTCDay(), month = this.getUTCMonth();
    var hours = this.getUTCHours(), minutes = this.getUTCMinutes();
    function pad(num) { return num.toPaddedString(2); };

    return format.gsub(/\%([aAbBcdDHiImMpSwyY])/, function(part) {
      switch(part[1]) {
        case 'a': return $w("Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat")[day]; break;
        case 'A': return $w("Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday")[day]; break;
        case 'b': return $w("Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec")[month]; break;
        case 'B': return $w("January February March April May June July August September October November December")[month]; break;
        case 'c': return this.toString(); break;
        case 'd': return this.getUTCDate(); break;
        case 'D': return pad(this.getUTCDate()); break;
        case 'H': return pad(hours); break;
        case 'i': return (hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12; break;
        case 'I': return pad((hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12); break;
        case 'm': return pad(month + 1); break;
        case 'M': return pad(minutes); break;
        case 'p': return hours > 11 ? 'PM' : 'AM'; break;
        case 'S': return pad(this.getUTCSeconds()); break;
        case 'w': return day; break;
        case 'y': return pad(this.getUTCFullYear() % 100); break;
        case 'Y': return this.getUTCFullYear().toString(); break;
      }
    }.bind(this));
  }
});

UPDATE: Bugs fixed. Thanks Andrew and Stephen

Also, some of my old and new code has been posted on GitHub. You might find something useful.

Feb04

A beautiful, organic animation by Flight404 created using Processing.

Processing in Action
Jan08

Aaron Patterson shows us how to define ruby methods which can be called from JavaScript using RKelly.
permalink
Jan07

Dustin might not surprise you at your house with a book in hand, but he’ll damn sure send you his innermost fu in the form of a shiny yellow and black book. It’s an excellent read if you’re looking to put more funk in your functions and class in your classes. Check out “Pro JavaScript Design Patterns” by Dustin and Ross Harmes.

—I’m Justin Palmer and I approve this message.
permalink
Dec23

IE 8 PAsses the Acid 2 Test for those not keeping tabs on things.
permalink
Oct24

Mislav has written up an excellent overview on upgrading Radiant (which used 1.5) to Prototype 1.6. The article does a great job of showing how 1.6 is superior to 1.5.
permalink
Oct19

According to the New York Times, the Daily Show Archives, with over 7,000 videos are online—free and searchable.
permalink
Oct11

Telemarketer gets owned
Oct10

—Erik Kastner shows us how it’s done.

Making an iPhone app in about a minute