Every web developer will spend a sufficient chunk of their time testing and fixing webpages so that they work across as many browsers as possible. We all groan at the mention of IE6, which is here to stay for a little while yet, even with the various efforts to change that.

I like to keep my computer as lean and mean as possible and installing all the browsers frustrates me. On top of that, one must keep an additional installation of XP as a virtual machine, just to test IE6. Don’t get me wrong, I cheered at the day that IE Tester was released but unfortunately progress on that project is slow and bugs are large, so the virtual machine tends to win.

Today all that changed for me. I came across Xenocode, who are in the virtualization space. Instead of creating entire virtual machines, OS and all, Xenocode software allows you to create a virtual environment for a single piece of software. This means that everything that is required to run that piece of software is all neatly wrapped up in a bite-sized executable. So what does this mean? All the major browsers as single executables. Awesome.

Just click on the browser you want, download the executable and run it. No more installing or virtual machines to clog up your machine.