Historically, Internet Explorer earned a reputation among web developers for being idiosyncratic and dodgy when it came to web standards. But over the past few years, Microsoft has been working to reverse that reputation. The next version of Internet Explorer, bundled with the Windows 10 Technical Preview, is supposed to be the next step in that evolution.
But not everyone wants to run the Windows 10 beta, which is why Microsoft launched RemoteIE, a new service that lets people stream a remote Windows virtual machine running Windows 10 and the latest version of Internet Explorer. It’s designed to give web developers the ability to test their sites on the future of Microsoft’s browser without having to jump through any hoops.
It’s powered by Microsoft Azure’s RemoteApp service, and will run on just about any system, including Windows 7, Mac OS X, iOS and Android. That’s right: web devs will be able to test their sites on Internet Explorer for free using an iPad.
RemoteIE is convenient, but people who want to do extensive testing should probably just install Windows 10. RemoteIE instances automatically kick people out after 10 minutes of inactivity, and sessions are kept to a 60 minute maximum. Users can start up another instance right after they get kicked off, but their work won’t get saved between sessions.
At the moment, the service is limited to the new version of IE, but developers who want to test other versions of Microsoft’s browser can use the set of Modern.IE virtual machine images.
Developers interested in signing up for RemoteIE can do so here.
