In some cases, you may be able to just use Microsoft Edge for Mac to access sites that only work with IE. Microsoft has since replaced IE on Windows with Microsoft Edge and the company officially discontinued Internet Explorer on all platforms in August 2021.

The problem for Mac users is that some websites such as corporate intranets, HR and banking sites still require Internet Explorer to access them. (This is not an ad, I’m just shouting this out as a very cool tool.) With Inspect, I can plug in my real iOS device via USB and get a Chrome DevTools instance for it.If you’ve just switched to Mac from Windows you need to be aware that Internet Explorer for Mac doesn’t exist. I didn’t think this was really possible, but then I saw Inspect. No Mac and still need to test on a real device? I just did a little testing and I found the Chrome DevTools a little janky to use (a giant left panel renders, the click-to-select element feature didn’t work, and I kept losing WebSocket connection). They even jack Chrome DevTools in there somehow. You can use something like CrossBrowserTesting to do this right on the web. But that’s - uhhhh - not super practical. I have heard of people running over to Best Buy or an Apple Store to quick debug something on a display machine. Select the real device (which must have Safari open on some website) and you’ll get a DevTools instance of that website. You have to have the phone plugged in via USB (no wireless charging connection or whatever) and then you’ll see the device in that same Develop menu. If you have a Mac, doing this is pretty similar to what we just did. And if you can run the iOS simulator, that means you can run desktop Safari as well, and thus even have access to DevTools that can reach into the simulator. I happen to have a Mac, so I can have XCode installed and thus have an iOS simulator that is pretty easy to pop open. Problem not showing here? Then the problem is actually unique to iOS Safari. Now you’re actually using Safari, which is way closer to iOS Safari than desktop Chrome is. Does it seem actually specific to Safari? Lemme check Desktop Safari first since that’s just a few clicks away. Note that this does a smidge more than just display your site in a smaller area: it sends the correct User Agent String and Client Hints for that device.

Lemme just use the device mode in Chrome quick. These are my general steps, starting with not even using iOS Safari.

Emulate iphone safari on mac