My wife and I are launching a website in the near future. As part of the ongoing development process, we’d been talking about testing alternate browsers. We’re able to test Internet Explorer 6 on our machines using Darwine and ie4osx. Still, that left us without a great option to do IE7 testing.

As it happens, we have an older MacBook Pro 2.33 that fell off of Craigslist. We’d like to sell it, but Robin brought up using it as a Windows machine. I figured with Boot Camp and a Windows license, sure, we could be in business. However, with Windows XP or Vista licenses running between $120 and $300, I was eager to find an alternate solution. Bootstrapping a business means funneling money into product, not blowing the budget on something we’ll use infrequently. The tool can be essential, but infrequently used and thus, too expensive.

I remembered at work, one of our sysadmins set-up up some virtual machines to allow Linux and Mac OS X users to test on Windows XP. So, my thought was to use Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) running Windows Server 2003. Handily, the machine images already use IE7. I fired up EC2 instances about four different times. At $0.125 per instance/hour and a little bit extra for Amazon S3 usage to load the image, our tests wound up at a whopping $0.52.

How I went about this:

• Sign up for and Amazon Web Services account
• Sign up for Amazon EC2 and S3
• Install the Elasticfox Firefox extension
• Downloaded and installed Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac
• Download and read the Elasticfox Getting Started Guide. I followed the initial tutorial steps through page 17, with the exception of using the Remote Desktop client in place of connecting via Elasticfox, strictly out of familiarity.

There are other places I can take this, building a machine image with other browsers installed and storing the image on S3. In fact, that’ll probably making sense for us later this week.

There are other, largely unexplored options, mentioned here for future reference:

• Browsershots A service that screen shots a site in several browsers.
• litmus Free testing up to 50 times/month in FF2 and IE7. Or spend $24 for a day pass or get a month for $49. The tests give you screen shots and HTML and CSS validity reports. They do email testing, too.
• CrossBrowserTesting.com

Screen shot services aren’t as useful because while you see what the page renders as, you don’t get a sense of what quirks a user will run into if, say, a JavaScript action fires differently. That’s the situation we’re in. The pages look fine, but don’t act like they should.