Web developers need to have old browsers on their computers. Not only to verify bugs, but ofter also for running some special software related to web development (unit tests, functional tests, etc.)

JsTestDriver is a tool for running JUnit tests across browsers nicely (other unit tests frameworks also supported). Google Chrome 14 breaks compatibility with JsTestDriver. Namely you don’t get stack traces from failed tests, making debugging tests utterly difficult. The same goes for Firefox 6+ (not sure if this somehow related to ECMAScript 5 changes regarding exception objects?)

Google doesn’t seem to provide downloads for the old versions of Google Chrome and neither does open source Chromium project. This habit is also adopted by Mozilla with recent Firefox fast-cycle releases. This all makes my life pain, makes me bang my head to the keyboard, in long run resulting to brain damage and to the death. So your hands are stained with my blood, dear browser developers.

As my last will I hope to save fellow web developers for walking this Via Dolorosa. Here is Google Chrome 13 DMG file for OSX. You can use it to downgrade Chrome to version 13. Before installing, just disable Chrome auto-update:

defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 0

It runs JsTestDriver perfectly.

Hope this helps.

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