There are far too many guides on the net about running multiple versions of IE on the same machine. And most of them are a pain in the ass to set up.

Here’s something I bumped into today: Spoon’s Browser Sandbox. Spoon have a plugin that can launch all sorts of applications from your browser. It streams virtualised application packages to your PC through the browser. A couple of clicks and IE6 - or any other application they have in their portal - will launch.

This is probably the single best use of application virtualisation that I’ve seen in the wild. It’s the kind of “just works” technology I love. Great for web developers or occasional hacks (I’m in the latter category).

And just for the hell of it - here is a screenshot of Firefox (running natively), IE8 (running in a Windows VM via VMware Fusion) and IE6 (running in the VM with Spoon) all on my MacBook Pro: