Web designers who work in Linux may find it difficult to test their work with all of today’s popular browsers. One of the major difficulties is that the most popular one is Internet Explorer which is only available for MS Windows. Even though this browser is known for its quirky interpretation of web standards, it is so widespread that web designers can’t afford to ignore it.

You can always try to run Windows applications on Linux using Wine but finding all DLL dependencies and registry entries can turn to be a total pain.

Introducing IEs4Linux

The Microsoft browser is an integral part of Windows and relies heavily on the WinAPI. Even though Wine is designed to handle WinAPI references, installing Internet Explorer with it can be an adventure.

IEs4Linux is a collection of shell scripts that automatically download the compressed packages (.cab files) from Microsoft’s website, modify the configuration files and use Wine to install the software. The current version of IEs4Linux supports Internet Explorer versions 5.0, 5.5 and 6. Version 7 of IE is supported in the latest beta version of IEs4Linux.

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