Internet Explorer 8

You have to install a complete copy of Windows on the Mac.

http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/04/internet-explorer-for-mac-ie7-ie8-ie-9-free/

We’re going to walk you through how to install Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 in a virtual machine running Windows, directly in Mac OS X – for free. This is achieved by using the freely available VirtualBox software from Oracle, and combining that with free Internet Explorer testing virtual machines from Microsoft, the trick is converting these free IE vm’s so that they work flawlessly under OS X (or Linux, technically), and that is all handled automatically with this method.

I am not sure if QuickTimeKirk and kahjot have understood what WineBottler is doing.

For the benefit of everyone WINE stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It allows running some but not all Windows applications without having to run Windows itself. WINE was originally developed for Linux but as Linux and Unix are kissing cousins and the Mac runs a variety of Unix versions of WINE have therefore also been ported to the Mac.

So in theory yes it would be possible to 'bottle' IE and run it via WINE. However as I mentioned not all applications work, WINE is constantly being enhanced to improve support for more applications but it always plays catch up and in fact is often way behind supporting current versions. It would be worth looking at the following web pages.

http://www.wikihow.com/Install-Internet-Explorer-on-Mac-Using-WineBottler

https://coderwall.com/p/dnl8rg/use-ie-on-osx-with-wine

https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=4225

Note: CrossOver Mac is a commercial version of WINE for both Mac and Linux. Being a paid for version it is more polished and might support more applications.

In addition to the above paid for version of WINE i.e. CrossOver for Mac, there are the following free alternatives.

http://winebottler.kronenberg.org

http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/tiki-index.php

https://www.playonmac.com/en

http://sourceforge.net/projects/darwine/

https://code.google.com/p/osxwinebuilder/

Even if IE 8 is not officially listed as working it may be worth trying it.

I understand what WINE does. I was just providing another option that I saw very recently that appears to be free. I got Crossover some years ago, but was not too impressed with what it could actually run. Recent versions of IE were a priority for me at that time but they weren't supported.

kahjot wrote:

I understand what WINE does. I was just providing another option that I saw very recently that appears to be free. I got Crossover some years ago, but was not too impressed with what it could actually run. Recent versions of IE were a priority for me at that time but they weren't supported.

Fair enough and your right that VirtualBox is free, however it would still require a paid for version of Windows in order to allow using IE 8 or later. If you were proposing running WINE in Linux via VirtualBox I fail to see how that would be any different or better than using WINE in the Mac directly.

The point of the article is that it can be done without a paid-for version of Windows:

This is achieved by using the freely available VirtualBox software from Oracle, and combining that with free Internet Explorer testing virtual machines from Microsoft…

I haven't tried it, and don't have a compelling reason to try it. It was just something I came across recently that might work OK, and the price is right.

kahjot wrote:

The point of the article is that it can be done without a paid-for version of Windows:

This is achieved by using the freely available VirtualBox software from Oracle, and combining that with free Internet Explorer testing virtual machines from Microsoft…

I haven't tried it, and don't have a compelling reason to try it. It was just something I came across recently that might work OK, and the price is right.

Thanks for pointing this out, I was unaware Microsoft provided free VMs for this.

Fro the benefit of others they can be found at this link https://www.modern.ie/en-gb/virtualization-tools

I actually had several of these Windows VMs configured in VirtualBox to test web design compatibility for IE7 - IE10 browser range. If I remember, you can't perform MS software updates, default browser security is too high for normal downloads, and the VMs have a limited shelf-life before they expire.

The VMs do have a limited shelf life. The OS X Daily article deals with ways to extend the 30-day limit. I remember finding a site years ago that was supposed to render your code as it would appear in IE, but it was pretty clunky and seemed to choke easily. The version of Crossover that I had then didn't support the versions of IE that I needed to test with. Having even very limited VMs that would allow testing two or three versions of IE would have been lovely.