I've been struggling with this problem for a while. Virtualization would be a good solution, but it's too slow for my needs. A laptop can only handle so much: running a development environment alongside Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and then trying to do virtualization while connected to a plethora of servers and with a lot of other things going on in the background is... well... slow.
I have the following setup now that solves the problem gracefully, although it is a bit expensive, it's worth it:
- One Macbook connected to an external display
- One Windows desktop, with Windows XP and Windows Vista installed dual boot
Both machines run Synergy, sharing the keyboard and mouse across machines, so I can easily switch between the two. Since they're separate computer I don't have any performance issues and can happily Photoshop along on my Mac while my Windows machine still has each and every browser running.
This setup covers most of browsers in graded browser support as defined by Yahoo! http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/:
Browsers:
- Firefox 2 Mac
- Firefox 3 Mac
- Firefox 3 windows
- Firefox 2 Windows
- Webkit nightly Mac
- Safari 3 Windows
- Safari 4 Mac
- Google Chrome Latest version Windows
- Opera latest version Windows
- Opera latest version Mac
- Internet Explorer 6 (on the XP part of the Windows machine)
- Internet Explorer 8 w/ IE7 compatibility mode (on the Vista part of the Windows machine)
E-mail clients covered:
- Apple Mail
- Thunderbird == Firefox rendering engine (on the XP machine)
- Outlook Express == IE6 rendering engine
- Outlook 2003 (on the XP machine)
- Outlook 2007 (on the Vista machine)
- All the popular web clients on all the browsers mentioned above (Live mail, Gmail, Yahoo! mail)
Things this setup doesn't cover:
- I don't have Mac OS 10.4
- I only test the latest version of Opera, not any earlier versions (due to it's small userbase)
- I test Safari 3 and Safari 4, both one on Windows and one on the Mac, not both versions on both platforms. Now, Safari 4 is still in beta anyway; and Safari always has and had a very good rendering engine.
- As for e-mail clients, I've never bothered testing Lotus Notes
You can check out a video of the setup here.