Run Internet Explorer 7 on a Mac

While investigating mysterious textfield behaviour on a site, I had need of testing on the venerable Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), which I've found to be somewhat of a quirky beast.

In the past, I would've just fired up Windows XP on
VirtualBox and run IETester, but since doing a clean install of Snow Leopard, I haven't had a chance to restore the virtual machines. Well, I would've restored them if I hadn't been using an older version of VirtualBox that allowed me to re-use the virtual machine images, but I digress.

Luckily, a bit of Googling led me to WineBottler, a nifty tool that allows you to run Windows executables under WINE.

All I had to do was to mount the installation image, drag WINE and WineBottler over to my Applications folder, and I was almost done. Next I got my hands on the IE7 executable (aptly named "iexplore.exe"), double-clicked on it and got this message:

I chose to convert it to an OSX application using WineBottler, which wraps it in the WINE elements required to run it. This expanded it from 635Kb to 303Mb, but is portable, meaning that I can copy it over to any OSX machine and it will work.

I launched it, and voila! Here is a screen capture of IE7 running in its X11 glory.