Over the years, I’ve tried several different methods for testing my work in different versions of IE. I tried IETester, but performance was sketchy. Then I tried MultipleIE, which worked okay, but it’s no longer being maintained. Eventually I settled on IE Collection. For the most part, these testing tools worked well for quick previewing of layout and functionality, however, they’re known to have some issues which can result in a less than accurate experience.

Recently, I’ve been trying something different: Snapshots. Jonathan Snook’s recent post about using Snapshots in VMWare Fusion, made me wonder if I could do the same thing in VirtualBox (by Sun/Oracle). It turns out that you can!

After setting up your VM, in my case, Windows XP with IE6, take your first snapshot. Then install IE7 along with any updates and take the next snapshot. Finally, install IE8 and take the final snapshot. You can now restore each snapshot, at that specific moment in time, and have a clean OS install with a fresh version of IE for testing.