Face it: as a Plone developer in particular (and web developer in general) you just can't afford to ignore Windows Internet Explorer and its entertainingly quirky interpretation of web standards.

So, being the happy owner of an Intel powered Mac for some time now, I've been keeping a close eye on Parallel's ambitious entré into the Macintosh virtualization scene a while back when they entered beta stage. While it had lots of rough edges then I was really impressed at the pace at which they introduced bug fixes and improvements. My secret benchmark for testing its viability was (of course) to see, whether I could watch the Daily Show on its own (crappy) website, which heavily relies on the Windows Media Format.

And while viewing said site in previous beta versions of Parallels (using my age-old but oddly trusty copy of Windows 2000) used to crash Parallels time and again I'm now happy to report that it just runs flawlessly with the recent release candidate. Seriously, Parallels has now become the currently best option to run Windows on MacIntel hardware without having to dualboot.

I'd really like to commend the folks at Parallels for a job well done and will order my copy right now (as long as I can still take advantage of the pre-order benefit).