I’ve had an Intel Mac for a few months now, and I’ve been wanting to comment on Parallels Desktop for OSX, the software that lets a user emulate windows at nearly full speed while still in their native Mac environment.

I’ve been holding off on passing judgment for a particular feature to be released to the public: namely what the Parallels team calls “Coherence Mode”. Using Parallels Desktop in coherence mode is really quite a technological feat: it gives the user a fully functional PC version of an .exe such as Internet Explorer, running as a windowed application, like any other program in OSX. Parallels recently released a beta of their emulation app with coherence mode enabled, so I jumped at the chance to slap it on my Intel Mac, a little machine I like to call “The Iron Giant“.

I’m really happy to say that coherence mode lives up to the expectation, and perhaps the best part about it is that it really doesn’t feel special at all. Boot up your virtual machine, open IE, and switch into coherence: after that you can drag and resize IE, open multiple windows, even minimize to a version of the Windows start bar that lives inside of OSX. The last hurdle I have to jump will be setting up a second virtual machine and seeing if coherence mode will let me run an IE6 and IE7 window simultaneously. Now THAT would truly be remarkable.