Azure-based RemoteIE lets developers test with Internet Explorer from Windows PCs, Macs, and iOS and Android devices -- for 10 minutes at a time
Microsoft has a big problem. How does it get people to develop for
its widely used Web browser, when most Web design and development is
done on other platforms? Having learned the lesson of "Built for IE"
banners the hard way, it's fighting hard on two fronts: encouraging
developers to work with the latest Internet Explorer releases, and
moving users away from older browsers.
The Internet Explorer team has been using its modern.ie site to explore ways of encouraging developers to target the latest, HTML5-ready IE. Part of that story is a status page
that shows what Web standards are supported and, more important, which
are being considered for support. Developers can download virtual
machines loaded with browsers, so they can test sites on Mac and Linux,
while an experimental tool lets developers run the next IE release on
Windows PCs.
That experiment with side-by-side application virtualization has led to the release of RemoteIE,
a way of delivering a preview of the next Internet Explorer release
from Microsoft's Azure cloud. Accessible from Windows, Mac OS X, iOS,
and Android devices, RemoteIE uses Microsoft's Azure RemoteApp
to run the browser in a Windows Server VM on Azure, allowing developers
to try IE against their test servers from any of these desktop or
mobile platforms -- as long as those servers are accessible from the
public Internet.
Announced at TechEd back in May, Azure RemoteApp
is an answer to the latest iteration of the question, "Why do I need to
deliver a full desktop to a tablet or a phone?" By using cloud-hosted
VMs to deliver application UIs, there's no need to leave familiar ways
of working for the Windows world. The technology has been slipstreamed
into the latest versions of the cross-platform Remote Desktop client.
With RemoteIE, which is based on Azure RemoteApp, developers can test their Web apps in Internet Explorer by running IE in the Azure cloud.
Does it work? I signed up for the trial, chose an Azure instance
close to my home, and waited for the activation email. It took about 15
minutes to arrive – enough time for Microsoft's automated provisioning
tools to add an account to a pre-provisioned Azure VM. Using the
RemoteApp client to connect to an instance was easy enough, and I could
use it from an iPad, an Android tablet, and an iPhone, as well as from a
PC. Drilling down into the VM I could see I was sharing it with about
200 other users – keeping Azure resource usage to a minimum.
RemoteIE
isn't perfect, with an enforced time limit cutting you off after 10
minutes of idle time or after an hour of using the service. While it's
easy enough to log back on, be aware of the 10-minute window if you're
trying to debug a complex problem. You also can't use the
GPU-acceleration features of the latest IE releases, so it's tricky to
use RemoteIE to test WebGL and other GPU-intensive Web technologies.
Using
RemoteApp to deliver a browser to developers makes a lot of sense.
Microsoft has the scale in Azure to run the necessary VMs, and
developers no longer need to worry about the licensing issues associated
with running the latest Windows on their development Macs. It's not a
complete panacea. RemoteApp only works on the latest versions of Windows
Server, so there's no option of delivering older Internet Explorer
releases this way – though there's scope for using it with IE10 and
IE11, as well as the current developer preview.
While some may
complain about the absence of older browsers in the RemoteIE release,
this isn't about supporting older releases. It's more about getting rid
of them. With IE6 well on the way out, Microsoft is now aiming to get
rid of IE7 and IE8 as well. By encouraging high-profile sites to support
IE10 and IE11, Redmond hopes to encourage Windows 7 and Windows 8 users
to upgrade to these more modern browsers.
Recapturing Web
developer mind share is going to be hard, but getting IE back onto the
Macintosh desktop – even in this roundabout way – is a start. With
RemoteIE, Internet Explorer is a click away, right beside Chrome,
Safari, and Firefox – making it as easy to test sites in all browsers,
not only one or two. It will be interesting to see what comes next.
Source: http://www.infoworld.com
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