For the most part, the Mac has been an insanely productive environment for web development. The 1GB MacBook Pro stays snappy even when running three or four Ruby VMs loaded with beefy Rails apps, a local PostgreSQL database, many Vims, a couple Terminals, Firefox (with many tabs), The Gimp, and iTunes. I've been spending something on the order of 80 hours/week in this world for some time now and there’s just not a whole lot of pain to report on.

I get a little paranoid when stuff Just Works though so it’s a good thing 99.9% of our customers run Internet Explorer. I'm pretty hard on IE but I will admit to at least one thing it does really well: destroying any sense of pleasantness a developer may feel when building web applications.

We like to test on three different versions of IE:

  1. A fully patched IE 6.0 on a fully patched XP SP2.
  2. The stock IE 6.0 that comes off the original (pre-SP2) XP install media with no patches.
  3. A fully patched IE 7.0 on a fully patched XP SP2.

Of course, you can’t do anything silly like run multiple versions of IE on a single machine. Before IE 7.0, we had two machines (that’s actual physical machines) acting as Terminal Servers for each of the IE 6.0 versions. This sucks for the obvious reasons but adds another soul eating component to the mix: Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection for Mac.

  • Slow (still compiled for PPC).
  • Buggy horribly flaky mess of crap hasn’t been updated in years.
  • Cannot start more than one session at a time making it impossible to quickly switch between the IEs.

Once IE 7.0 became a reality, we decided to pony up for Parallels. Unplugging the two Windows boxes instead of adding another one more than paid for the Parallels license but the switch didn’t really solve the productivity problems since you still have to fire up a resource hungry VM for each IE.

IEs Running In The Dock

The latest Parallels beta’s Coherence Mode is trying really hard to bring something of a Mac native feel to Windows apps running under the VM (watch a screencast). Here we have IE 6.0 and IE 7.0 running in the Dock next to Safari and Firefox (kind of grosses you out at first).

You can drag those guys over to make them persistent Dock items. Launching from the Dock will start the VM, enter Coherence Mode, and start a new instance. You can also use QuickSilver:

Quicksilver and the IEs

That’s the good news. The bad news is that after about ten minutes of running with both VMs open, I started to smell burning electronics. The MacBook didn’t seem to be running any hotter than normal and I didn’t see any smoke so I figured maybe it was unrelated. When I went to pack up and go home for the day, I noticed that about ½" of the power cord had melted away, leaving the bare wire exposed!

Melted Power Cord

Taking every precaution, I quickly “fixed” the issue using a pair of paper scissors and black duct tape.

The 85W MagSafe Power Adapter product page has a ton of negative reviews mentioning the “melting thing” and Apple technicians have allegedly said the cause is a hardware issue that causes the laptop to draw too much power. Whatever.

EDIT: apparently, that last paragraph did not do a very good job of relaying my discontent with the melting power cord issue. To be clear: power cords should not melt, even when running beta software. This is clearly an Apple issue.

Tinkering around with the Parallels VM configuration seems to help a bit. I tried to create the lightest VM for running IEs as possible. Here’s a few tips that seem to be helping:

  1. Remove sound, floppy, CD/DVD, and USB from the Parallels configuration.
  2. Under Options / Advanced set the Cache Policy to Mac OS X.
  3. Under Memory, set Main Memory way low (I have mine at 96MB) and adjust the Video Memory to your maximum screen resolution (I have mine at 8MB).
  4. In Windows, disable as many services as possible. Things like Windows Update, the bullshit firewall, sound, the theme engine, etc.

These have not been rigorously tested but everything seems to be running much more smoothly on a 1GB MacBook Pro after an hour or so. Slapping another GB of RAM in here would probably make things a lot smoother as well but I just can’t get over the idea of having to double my RAM just to run a couple of IEs.

All in all, Parallels makes IE suck a bit less on the Mac but this is still a horrible broken mess. What are you guys doing about the IE problem?

This entry has been tagged coding, web, microsoft, ie, tools, osx, mac, parallels — follow a tag for related essays, articles, and bookmarks.

Discuss

  1. If you still have those terminal servers lying around. a friend of mine wrote this: http://cord.sourceforge.net/ – Cocoa remote desktop. It may work with http://www.cendio.com/seamlessrdp/ as well.

    — Justin on Saturday, December 23, 2006 at 11:24 AM #

  2. You can run multiple copies of the remote desktop client. Just copy the executable and put them in the dock. This also works for firefox. I have one copy with all my bookmarks and plugins and another one with just the dev plugings that I like. The key in this case to one run the actual executable in the firefox folder with —ProfileManager from the commandline and create a new profile. Then when you start firefox it will ask which profile to use.

    — Erik on Monday, December 25, 2006 at 06:31 PM #

  3. I have had very good success running IE 6 fully patched alongside IE 7 installed via “standalone mode” as described here: http://tredosoft.com/IE7_standalone

    The process is still maddening, but on my MacBook w/ 3GB of RAM I can quickly rip through presentation testing on Firefox, IE 6/7, Opera and Safari very quickly.

    That power cord non-sense is a rough scene.

    — Blake Watters on Tuesday, December 26, 2006 at 12:55 AM #

  4. How can you blame a hardware failure on a software issue?

    — Jim on Tuesday, December 26, 2006 at 01:24 PM #

  5. @Jim

    I was wondering the same thing… regardless of how hard you are working your mac — the power cord should be able to handle every bit of current draw a non-malfunctioning macbook can pull.

    — Shaun on Tuesday, December 26, 2006 at 01:32 PM #

  6. Just install IE7 as normal and install Multiple IE in your virtual machine, then you can test all the way back to IE3 if you like.

    http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

    — Matt Elmore on Tuesday, December 26, 2006 at 01:56 PM #

  7. How can you blame a hardware failure on a software issue?

    Software flaws can reveal a perviously undetected hardware flaw. So in one sense, the software flaw is at fault. Though of course the best solution is to fix the hardware flaw.

    — Jonathan Allen on Tuesday, December 26, 2006 at 04:57 PM #

  8. Given the location of where the power cord melted, I would suspect that the strain relief of the power supply is not good enough and that it allowed the cable wiring to get damaged. This is probably what generated the heat that melted the cable.

    — Neil on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 01:52 PM #

  9. That Digg-blocking thing doesn’t seem to work.

    I clicked on the link you have above, then returned from Digg (both IE and Firefox).

    Maybe they worked around your trick somehow?

    — your Digg block oesn't work on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 02:45 PM #

  10. Hmm, well I don’t know much about Mac since I got my AMD Dual core I am getting the best computer experience for years.

    Regarding the browser issues I can recommend a far better solution than manually testing i several different browsers.

    At least the layout of a page and the design can be tested using: www.browsercam.com

    — Kristian Tørning on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 04:14 PM #

  11. Ryan: Ubuntu + Wine + IEs4Linux

    — Justin Watt on Sunday, December 31, 2006 at 02:16 AM #

  12. Did you try hooking this up to your glowing pedals for your car?

    — Dr. Claw on Sunday, December 31, 2006 at 09:04 AM #

  13. we all know they try to make save money manufacturing in china and they don’t put the same quality materials

    — axel on Sunday, December 31, 2006 at 10:39 AM #

  14. Where did you get those nifty ie7 and ie6 icons for Mac? I've been running parallels and haven’t' come across any good doc icons for versions of IE. Oh and digg is soooo 2006.

    — parrfolio on Sunday, December 31, 2006 at 05:38 PM #

  15. Parrfolio, the latest versions of the Parallels beta have a checkbox preference for creating Dock icons for all your running Windows apps — it’s pretty nice when you’re using the Coherence mode and have hidden your Windows Taskbar. Those IE icons you see in the screenshot come from this option being turned on…

    — Jason on Tuesday, January 02, 2007 at 01:38 PM #

  16. Macs suck, get a real computer. Stupid apple cant even get their computers right, let alone their music players. Windows Rocks, and teh Zune is Kick ASS. Fuck Apple

    — I hate MACS on Sunday, January 07, 2007 at 09:41 AM #

  17. Why bother? People who read Digg are inferior to all other people on the Internet. Even the furries.

    — Leeroy on Monday, January 08, 2007 at 09:38 AM #

  18. re: improving XP performance, if you haven’t already done this I would recommend right-clicking on my computer, go to the advanced tab, click on the first Settings button (in the performance box) and select Adjust for best performance. If for some reason that leaves any of the boxes below checked, just uncheck them. That un-does a lot of memory-eating crap too.

    Matt via waxy.org.

    — Matt on Monday, January 08, 2007 at 12:58 PM #

  19. You can run multiple copies of the remote desktop client.

    — power cord on Thursday, May 01, 2008 at 10:18 PM #

  20. Where did you get those nifty ie7 and ie6 icons for Mac?

    — moulding on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 06:15 AM #

  21. I was wondering the same thing

    — power cords on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 06:16 AM #

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