UPDATE: Mike has developed a GUI installer that automates all this lengthy process. More info here: ies4osx.

Yesterday I got to watch DVDs from other regions on MacOS X. Today I’ve got to run one of the other few things I missed on OS X: Internet Explorer.

Please don’t get me wrong: I don’t really miss Explorer, but you’ve got to admit that you need it from time to time, just to check if it’s compatible with some new web you’re developing. Like it or not, it’s the browser most people use, so your webs have to render OK on it. And I didn’t felt like installing a whole Windows system with VMware Fusion, Parallels or Qemu just for the sake of running Explorer… I wanted something simpler, like ies4linux but for the Mac.

So, why looking any further? Why shouldn’t ies4linux work on MacOS X? There’s a wine port, Darwine. Of course it isn’t really that simple, both Darwine and ies4linux have dependencies that don’t come out of the box with OS X. But there’re ports of all these apps that can be easily installed in our system.

For the terminal-impaired out there: I’ll assume that you’re going to download and unzip any needed files directly on the Desktop.

• Install Apple’s X11 port. It can be found on the MacOS X install CDs/DVDs. There’s an upgrade available on Apple’s support page, but I don’t know if it installs without having the CD version installed first.
• Install Darwine. There’s no official release, but there are at least two unofficial ones that I know of: this one and this other one. Either of them should work. Just mount the .dmg file and copy the whole Darwine folder (the foder itself, not just its contents) into your Applications folder.
• Install fink. In case of trouble, follow the instructions on its web page.
• Using fink, install the wget and freetype2 ports:

• Link the Darwine binaries and the “share” folder into fink’s folder structure:

• Download the corefonts for wine (direct link). Unzip it on the Desktop and copy the “cabextract” file on the fink dir structure (there’s a cabextract port on fink’s repositories, but it’s outdated and doesn’t work with ies4linux):

• Download and untar ies4linux. Run it with:

• Chose which Explorer version(s) you want to install, the language, etc.
• Go back to the corefonts folder and edit the “get_corefonts.sh” file (with TextEdit is OK) and modify the very last line from:

to:

• Run get_corefonts:

• Download the iexplore shell-script. Let’s say it’s on your Desktop, you’ll have to give it execution permissions (with chmod, only the first time) and run it with:

And that’s all! After running the script two windows should open: a terminal window X11 opens (don’t know why) and the Explorer window itself. In order to run Explorer you’ll always have to open a terminal and run the shell-script as above, cd Desktop and then ./iexplore, still don’t know how to run a shell-script from MacOS’ GUI. O:)

Any update, improvements, comments… or if somebody does a shell-script doing all these steps automatically… would be really appreciated. This worked for me.