Today the IE team released Remote IE. This is awesome. Let me explain.

IE on Everything

I realize it doesn’t sound impressive, but with Remote IE we can take anyone’s device and let you render IE and test and view sites.

This removes the requirement of Windows on your machine to test IE.

So? Isn’t this just a Public Citrix?

Pretty much, but the cool part isn’t the technology. The cool part is what it solves problem it. IE testing no longer requires Windows.

Developers have no more excuses.

No More Compatibility Excuses

Plus, more importantly, this puts the responsibility for web testing on the developer.

A common complaint about testing sites in IE is that they don’t want to run VMs or they don’t have a windows machine available. Remote IE solves all of those problems.

No hardware requirement. No OS requirement. Just an internet connection.

Now test your app in IE.

The Point

To many, this might not be a big deal. From a technology point, it’s nothing really new.

But, remove the requirement for Windows to be needed to test in IE shows me forward thinking inside of IE and Microsoft. It also gets makes developers accountable for their web compatibility.