Emulating Macs

testing mac browser support ... without a mac

[webdevsf]

Anyone know of a good Mac emulator? I tend to code my DHTML/JS "on the edge". Ie, i make sure it works in uplevel browsers, but since I don't have a mac (and have no intention of getting one), I can't really test my app for it.

I would like to, however, run Mac IE 5.2 and Safari to see how I'm doing.

Any thoughts?

[Macguru]

Hi webdevsf,

As far as I know, there is no Mac emulator that will allow you to run Safari and IE 5.2. The only ones I heard about was for very old Mac systems.

If it would exist, It would probably sell at the same price of a used G4...

[bill]

Has anyone tried the PearPC emulator? That keeps coming up as a promising open source project.

[encyclo]

Safari is based on KDE Konqueror, and they share bug-fixes, so you can get a very good idea of whether your site will work in Safari by running KDE on Linux.

[isitreal]

Safari is based on KDE Konqueror

You can get Konqueror to run on your pc, download the knoppix [knoppix.org] cd rom version of Linux [about 690mB, so if you don't have a fast connection, you might want to just buy the cd for a few dollars], that runs off your cdrom, not your harddrive, konqueror 3.2 is the default browser, just boot to the cdrom and your pc is a linux box for the session, browse to your website, check it. Probably won't work if you connect through a modem, but will work fine for most network type connections.

Konqueror doesn't appear to have fully integrated the Safari code yet, although it's fairly close. The default fonts won't look quite the same as they would on a mac, otherwise it's pretty similar. It will also save dan devine some bandwidth.

[microcars]

If I recall correctly, The Screensavers did a demo of the PearPC OS X emulator about a month or so ago.

It was interesting, but buggy as hell and even slower than Virtual PC is on the Mac. It's in like, alpha right now, not even beta, so it's fun to play with, but not for practical use.