Originally published on October 02, 2006 by Dirk Paessler
Last updated on March 03, 2022
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4 minute read
An administrator has to make sure that all users inside his LAN as well as visitors accessing his public web servers from the outside are enjoying a good user experience.Webpages must load fast, should look nice and the web applications must work. With so many different browsers out there it can become a daunting task to keep one's websites working on all of them. Today we are looking at an impressive VMWare appliance that helps a lot in this task!
What Are Virtual Appliances?
VMWare "virtual appliances" are complete virtualized computers which can simply be downloaded from the VMWare website. They explain:A virtual appliance is a fully pre-installed and pre-configured application and operating system environment that runs on any standard x86 desktop or server in a self-contained, isolated environment known as a virtual machine.They are offering a broad range of appliances from mail server over firewalls to application servers. All you need to run these appliances is your choice of VMWare Player (free), VMWare Server (free) or VMWare Workstation.
The Multi Browser Appliance
This appliance is based on the Linux derivate "Ubuntu 5.10" and offers 9 different browsers:
- Firefox 1.5
- Internet Explorer 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0 (running on Wine)
- Opera 8.54
- Konqueror 3.5.2
- ELink 0.10.4
- Lynx 2.8.5.
When you run the appliance for the first time you have to set the settings for your network and you have to install some of the browsers (IE and Opera are download on-the-fly from their webpages). All this works with an easy to use wizard. After this is done you can simply choose a browser, enter the URL and look at your site with each browser. This screenshot shows Firefox, Konqueror, IE6 and Opera at the same time (click to zoom in): And if you are ready you simply click the "Back to Snapshot" of VMWare and have a totally clean configured system to restart from scratch.
You there!
