Installing IE7 and IE8 in Linux with Wine

Normally I would run IE inside a Virtual Machine. I need IE to test my web applications with it. However I wanted to try to run IE7 and IE8 inside Wine (I tried with version 1.3.28). After installing wine and winetricks, from the command line:

export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine_ie7
winetricks ie7

export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine_ie8
winetricks ie8

I’ve then added the following aliases:

alias ie7="export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine_ie7 && wine 'C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore'"
alias ie8="export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine_ie8 && wine 'C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore'"

While IE starts and sorts of run, it crashes way too often. It means, I will keep on using a VirtualBox for now!