Nifty cross-browser testing tool
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I ran across this yesterday, and after trying it out immediately bookmarked it. http://www.spoon.net/Browsers/[^] This Spoon plug-in allows you to run instances of applications over the web in a small virtual environment. The link above has instances of all the major web browsers that you can run. I tried out IE6 and Safari 4, since I don't have either of them installed on this machine and they both worked great. Each one picked up my local settings and were able to use Flash and other plug-ins. I don't know the nitty-gritty details of how this works, but it appears to have a process called Spoon-Sandbox.exe that runs in the background to handle the virtualization. It looks to be pretty unobtrusive, as it's only using < 4MB of memory when idle and hitting a max of about 25MB of RAM and a brief peak of 25% CPU when I had a couple of the browsers running. I found a couple of limitations. First, I have Firefox 3.0.17 installed locally and trying to run Firefox 3.5 brought the older version up instead. Second, you cannot run multiple instance of the same browser at the same time. Still, I think it's a worthy tool and I plan on using it on future web projects.