New guy, I need advice on a new MAC

[GhostFly]

I need a new laptop and I'm considering a macbook pro. The problem is the website I need to enter orders at work requires me to use Internet Explorer. Can this be accomplished with a Mac? I'm guessing I would need to add parallels or some other program and purchase Windows and IE*?

Thanks for any help you can provide or recommendations

 

[thegoldenmackid]

There is Internet Explorer for Mac, it is however massively outdated. Sometimes one of the other browsers works despite being advertised. If it is only internet explorer, Parallels will be the more fine.

 

[Consultant]

Go to apple store, or try it on Windows safari.

Go to Safari / Preferences / Advanced
[Check] Show Develop menu in menu bar
Go to menu Develop / User Agent / I.E.

try the site.

Note the Develop / user agent thing is for that window only, you have to set it again in the future.

You can also run I.E. on OS X using VMWare, Parallels, VirtualBox, CrossOver.

 

[pdjudd]

To add on to what thegoldenmackid said, the version of Internet Explorer for Mac had nothing to do with the windows version except it shared its name and icon.

I have been able to access sites with safari that supposedly were IE only. The biggest no go to access would be ActiveX components, but those won't work on a Mac no matter what,

Edit: Also what Consultant said.

 

[Makosuke]

The suggestions here are already good, but I'll add that it is definitely possible to get just IE running via a WINE-like program like CrossOver (commercial) or other free options. These programs basically replicate just enough of the components of Windows to get some applications to run without actually needing a copy of Windows. The obvious advantage is you save yourself $100-200 on a Windows license.

In particular I'm thinking of a pre-built (and completely free) solution called ie4OSX:

http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/
(The site isn't working at this exact moment, but hopefully that's just a glitch.)

Not sure if these will also use ActiveX controls (which is pretty much the only reason that a site would actually be IE only, as opposed to just IE mostly but you can get by with other browsers), but it kind of sounds like it will.

Such things are pretty common because of web authors wanting to test in IE (which is a disturbingly large portion of web development) without needing Windows.