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.

From a legal point of view, you can install Internet Explorer if you own a MS Windows licence. The browser doesn’t have to be running on your Windows system though.

How To Install IEs4Linux

First you gotta make sure you’ve got Wine installed on your system. If not, you can grab a copy at http://www.winehq.org/site/download. They’ve got many binaries available so you should find one for your Linux distribution.

Next you gotta install the cabextract. Cabextract is a free software for extracting Microsoft cabinet files, also called .CAB files, on UNIX or UNIX-like systems. You can download cabextract here.

If you are logged in as root, log out and use your normal user account from here. Now that you’ve got the required component, download a copy of IEs4Linux and install it:

# wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
# tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
# cd ies4linux-*
# ./ies4linux

The installer will take you to a series of questions, download the necessary file and configure Wine. When the installation is completed, simply launch Internet Explorer by issuing one of these commands:

• ie5
• ie55
• ie6

Other Alternatives

For those who don’t want to bother with running IE on Linux, there are some online services such as Netrenderer (free) and Browsercam.com (commercial but offers many other browsers and OS) that allow you to see your work under Microsoft’s web browsers.

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