Having having read some pretty good reviews on CodeWeaver’s Crossover Office for Mac, I decided perhaps I can give it a shot on my Fedora Core 5 running on an aging Dell hardware. After all, Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0 are all I needed. Having an emulator to run Windows 2000 and Windows XP seem kind of a waste of resources. And besides, my dual P3 450Mhz Dell run VMWare with Windows on top of it extremely slowly. Basically Crossover allows the host operating system run most of Windows applications at almost native speed without having the headache of having to install Windows at all.
The installation of Crossover Office trial version was actually very easy — easiest of any Linux software I have ever tried. It was truly just click and install… none of that configuration nonsense geeks like so much (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And installation of IE 6.0 went also fairly smoothly without any hiccups. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where Crossover stops being useful for me as a web developer.
First of all, the CSS display mechanism in IE 6.0 sp1 under Crossover is all wrong. It’s nowhere near what the real IE 6.0 shows under Windows 2000 or XP. I was actually pretty freaked out to see some sites were rendered that I had to start up Windows 2000 and XP just to double check.
And then there’s the stability issue, most likely because of my aging hardware. Crossover crashed at least 4 times during the short 30 minutes I tested it. Configuration panels would freeze and configuration windows would go blank for no reason. I am pretty sure this had to do with my hardware more than anything else. But it was pretty frustrating having to issue “kill” commands on it.
If various versions of Internet Explorer work as they normally would in Crossover on the new Intel Macs, that’s another BIG reason for me to justify getting a MacBook Pro as soon as they come standard with Core 2 Dual chips. Better yet, Microsoft should just stop making software and become a hardware company — they are much better at that!
So I guess I won’t be paying for Crossover Office when the trial expires.