Microsoft Now Lets Developers Run IE On Android, iOS And OS X

You can now run the latest version of Internet Explorer on your Android, iOS, OS X or non-Windows 10 Windows machine. Microsoft has built and released something it calls RemoteIE, which allows developers to run the company’s browser preview builds without requiring them to be on the most current version of Windows.

Microsoft wants developers to build their websites to be compatible with its browser. At the same time, the company can’t expect all developers to use Windows. RemoteIE, which is powered by Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure, provides a reasonable compromise. (For some live examples, head here and here.)

The service is just for testing, with Microsoft noting that “[s]essions are limited to conserve server resources. Sessions idle for 10 minutes will be logged out and no session can last more than 60 minutes – you’ll need to start a new session.” RemoteIE is free.

In short, regardless of your operating system or development environment, you can now quickly spin up the latest Internet Explorer builds running on Windows 10 for no cost. Whether developers will use the service remains to be seen, but Microsoft is certainly offering an olive branch to the developing classes that do not use its platform.