Bangalore: Microsoft today introduced modern.IE – a free new online tool and a set of resources designed to make it easier for developers to enable their websites to work beautifully in Internet Explorer (IE). modern.IE is simple and smooth, easy to use, and is part of Microsoft’s idea to spend less time testing and more time building amazing sites.

As part of the modern.IE release, Microsoft also announced its partnership with BrowserStack, a leading virtual browser testing service that lets developers test their website on any browser on anyOS – regardless of the OS that the test machine is running.  For developers who visit the BrowserStack site via modern.IE, three months of free service is available. With this, developers also have an advantage of easy accessibility as the browsers on the service are maintained in the cloud. Microsoft also created add-ins for developers using Chrome or Firefox, which will give them single click access to the BrowserStack virtual testing service right from the browser of their choice. Additionally, Microsoft is also making available free virtual images for developers to download and run local versions of Internet Explorer with Windows for testing – even on Mac, Linux, or PC. These can be downloaded on Modern.IE.

While IE9 and the recently released IE10 represent an entirely new chapter in IE’s long history, customers on older versions of IE continues to be a challenge for developers to test for, particularly when those developers are on non-Windows platforms. Microsoft has analyzed these challenges and incorporated multiple changes in the product including adopting automatic updates to move customers to the latest version of IE.  Microsoft has also introduced Platform Previews for early developers to provide feedback and has embraced modern web standards coupled with cutting edge performance and advanced touch capabilities; a move that has been well accepted globally by the web developer community.