Make IE7 force refesh in virtual box?

[andyjamesnelson]

Hey.

I recently started using virtual box and the disk images provided by Microsoft for a testing environment.

The main issue I am having is that I cannot get IE7 to force refresh and actually pick up any of the CSS changes I make. Firefox has no issue running in the same environment.

Without this totally essential aspect, testing ain't working at all.

I'm also really interested in peoples opinions on the best ways to test in IE etc on windows from a mac.

The virtual box seems to run really well and hardly seems to slow my Imac done at all. Plus the disk images from Microsoft are free.

I can get hold of a windows xp / vista disk sure but do Parallels or vmware offer any benefits?

Let me know if you can help.

Andy

 

[angelwatt]

IE does generally cache stuff even when newer modified files exist. One thing to try, which I can't guarantee works is to use a meta tag to tell the browser not to cache. I'd only use that while you're testing though, because caching will save you on bandwidth, so is a good thing.

Testing IE: I have a dedicated XP machine from back before I converted some years ago. Also, depending on what type of stuff I'm testing, I find using IE6 on Mac through CrossOver is good enough most of the time. Depends on the techniques you're using on the site, whether that's good enough. Flash sites wouldn't be able to use it for instance. Overall though I've stopped caring too much about how IE displays my personal site. I already provide a message on my site to IE users to encourage them to upgrade to a real browser.

I've used Virtual Box before, but it was for Ubuntu. You mentioned a MS provided testing environment. Do happen to have a link handy for that? I might check it out. I like Virtual Box too.

 

[andyjamesnelson]

Hey

http://www.10voltmedia.com/blog/200...ll-internet-explorer-on-osx-using-virtualbox/

This is a good tutorial on using the disk images with virtual box. It has links to all the files needed.

Is there no way to force refresh with a keyboard command?

Also I wish I could not care about IE but when 50% of visitors are using it and its a commercial site there is no option but to care.

 

[andyjamesnelson]

I cannot use the meta tag tip because it interferes with the web-app I'm working on.

I really just need a way of force refresh with something like shift+control+f5 but it don't seem to work.

Is ctrl the same on windows?

 

[andyjamesnelson]

Hey I just installed Crossover and a version of IE6 and I'm having the same problem. I cannot get to reload the CSS changes I make?

 

[angelwatt]

Well for IE a hard refresh is done with ctrl+f5. You might want to check this write-up from MS about some settings that may provide better results on this issue. There's some settings for temporary files. In theory they should work.