We’re all Mac in-house but when you’re working in the world of software, if you’re doing anything web or World of Warcraft-related, you definitely need to test against Windows occasionally.

On the web side of things, Internet Explorer, while having the largest market share of any web browser, is also the most eccentric of web browsers when it comes to its interpretation of standards. And unfortunately, even the fact that you’re programming in LUA under World of Warcraft doesn’t mean that you won’t encounter problems related to the underlying OS.

For example, Mike has an add-on for World of Warcraft that supports his web site Epic Mount, for WoW guilds. The add-on is working fine under MacOS X but as of this week’s 2.1 update to WoW, is crashing randomly on Windows machines. Not having a Windows machine handy to test it with is a problem.

I used to use Windows all the time, until my Thinkpad caught on fire and Mike’s gentle pestering of “get a mac!” finally won out. I haven’t regretted the switch at all; I have a much better user experience using my Mac, and I have Unix under the hood for the software work I want to do, so no more fidgety hassles trying to get Perl or MySQL to work under Windows. As time goes by, though, my Windows-fu becomes weaker.

We do run Windows under MacOS X on our Intel Macs, via a nifty piece of software called “Parallels Desktop”. Parallels uses the Intel CPU’s native “virtualization” support to trick Windows into thinking it has the machine to itself. There’s very little performance penalty for most operations, but rather than talk directly to the hardware, hardware access has to be emulated. That means that rather than talk to the ethernet card directly, Windows talks to Parallels, which pretends (in software) to be the ethernet card, and makes shared access to the actual ethernet card work. This adds a lot of overhead to hardware accesses. Perhaps the worst issue here is video display card access… Parallels has to pretend (in software again) to be a video card. World of Warcraft has relatively stringent video card requirements; it requires hefty 3D acceleration support to run in even the most minimal mode. Parallels doesn’t yet offer that level of support. Which means, unfortunately, that while the Parallels solution is fine for testing against Internet Explorer under Windows, it won’t help us with testing with World of Warcraft.

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