Many web site designers work on a Mac, yet most web sites are viewed in Internet Explorer. Hence, designers have to run Windows under a virtual machine (Parallels or Fusion) or connect to a Windows machine remotely (RDC or VNC) to test out their sites on IE.Well no more. Some fine folks in the open source software community cobbled together a package for Mac OS X that includes the IE browser running on top of a Windows emulator. Get it from the IE 4 OS X site.
The only downside is that they are a version behind; IE 6 works, but IE 7 doesn't. It's still useful, as around 25% of people are using IE 6 to browse the web. You will probably want to test against it.
This won't prevent you from having to use one of the tools mentioned in the first paragraph to test out IE 7, but IE 6 for Mac OS X definitely makes the cross-browser debugging process a lot easier for me.
Oh, and the best way to get your designs working in IE? Using IE-specific HTML. I've given up creating the mythical cross-browser mark-up. I get it working in Firefox and Safari, then use IE-specific comments to patch things up in IE.

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