Web Development in Linux
 

There are a lot of great tools available for web developers in Linux. I recently put a fresh install of Kubuntu on my laptop. After getting Quicken and some other programs working in Wine, I decided not to install Virtualbox with Windows XP. However, I would like to test websites in Internet Explorer or other native Windows browsers, because the fonts generally appear bigger in Windows and this can sometimes screw up a layout. I know about ies4linux and also, I am able to run IE6 after getting it installed with winetricks.

So, the crux of the situation is that I want to keep the default fonts that come bundled with Linux so I can see what most Linux visitors see (this rules out installing msttcorefonts). But, I also want to see a pixel-perfect rendering of what most Windows visitors will see, without going through the whole rigamarole of installing Virtualbox with Windows XP.

Is there any way to test and see what a website will look like in Windows while without installing a Windows emulator?

No.

A web browser comes with what is called a rendering engine, which takes care of translating the HTML statements into something graphical. Don't take 'graphical' too literal, it is everything which appears in your browser window, including text and lines.

If the rendering engine is different, you'll see different results by definition. Worse, if the rendering engine is equal, you still may see different results.

Opera, Mozilla and derivatives are so called standard compliant because they adhere to the W3C standards. Still some versions have different displays for the same HTML.

IE6 is notorious for not following the standard, and displays most pages slightly of hugely different compared to Mozilla. About half of all CSS2 statements are interpreted in IE6's very special way. Because 'superb' products like Dreamweaver produced IE6 compliant code, almost every web pages display correctly on IE6, but might fail on other browsers including IE7 en IE8.

Because the rendering engine of IE6 is not generally available (alhough I believe it can be licenced to be included in other products) there is no product giving you the exact rendering of IE6 in Windows except IE6 in Windows.

I know it is bad news, sorry. I have Virtualbox installed and I run 3 browsers (IE6, Firefox and SeaMonkey) in addition to Opera and Firefox in Linux when I am developing web pages.

jlinkels