benshead

I’ve been a fan of virtualization for a few years now. I have two servers running VMWare Server at work and a machine that I’m testing VirtualBox with. When it came time to set J. up with a way to use her EMR from her home Mac, it seemed natural to dutifully buy a copy of Parallels Desktop and Windows Vista. And they both lived up to the hype, allowing her to use Internet Explorer to access the ActiveX-ridden web site that she needed to. Well, at least until her machine died last week.

Now I wish we’d saved our money. When she got her Macbook Pro back from Apple yesterday, it came with a new hard drive and a fresh os install. Before I went to the trouble of installing parallels and Vista again, I thought I would give ies4osx a try first.

Ies4osx is a gpl-licensed software package that installs with Darwine and provides Mac users an honest-to-goodness Internet Explorer that lives on the dock and launches like any other application. And it works nicely with ActiveX. Really. It should be noted that for now ies4osx only runs IE6. Apparently it used to run IE7 as well, but there were some problems with that.

It’s so easy and quick, though, that I certainly won’t be putting Parallels or Vista back on the Mac. I guess I can use the time I would have spent on that coming up with a better backup strategy…

Linux users should check out ies4linux, whose name is fairly self-explanatory when you think about it.