Back in November, I <a href="http://blog.reybango.com/2014/11/03/a-new-way-to-test-internet-explorer-on-os-x-ios-and-android/">wrote about RemoteIE</a> which is a tool we created to allow developers on non-Windows OSes to test Internet Explorer 11. It uses Microsoft's RemoteApp virtualization software to create a virtualized IE11 without the need to install a VM. The tool has been a hit and developers have been sending us a lot of requests to expand it out to other versions of IE.

One of the big limitations, though, is the fact that you can't access resources or sites locally hosted on your development machine. This is a cumbersome limitation and narrows the usability of the tool for testing. It's been nagging at me for awhile that we couldn't use this in this fashion but this past week I found a solution that I wanted to share.

<h2>ngrok - Secure Tunnels to localhost</h2>

Enter <a href="https://ngrok.com/">ngrok</a>, a very cool, lightweight tool that creates a secure tunnel on your local machine along with a public URL you can use for browsing your local site. When ngrok is running, it listens on the same port that you're local web server is running on and proxies external requests to your local machine.