Happy New Year! Time to start working on self improvement and developing new habits.

Not sure what habits to work on? Well, I’ll give you one: Test your application in IE.

And what do you know, the IE team has updated all their free VMs at modern.ie just in time for you to start testing.

Isn’t Spartan Replacing IE?

Who knows. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. The important thing to note though that whatever fate IE has, it’s not just going to disappear overnight.

Check out NetMarketShare

As you can see, IE8+ has quite the presence. Sure, you can argue and throw other stats sites back at me, but all of the major players say IE represents a big chunk of the internet.

Spartan or no Spartan, IE has a presence that will stick around one way or another. So you should probably test it to make sure it works.

Couple of Improvements

With the new VMs out, there have been a few changes for the good. More specifically:

• They use ZIP files rather than RAR
• New download options (single download or multiple)
• Upgrades to new versions of IE are turned off by default

Plus, all the OS updates through until November are installed, so you’ll pretty much good to go as soon as they are downloaded.

The Point

There are new VMs out and this is your chance to start testing your application properly, which needs to include IE whether or like it or not.

Thanks for Playing. ~ DW