Unwitting clients

If you are averse to disclosing your information and creating an account just to download a suitable MS desktop OS, you can also download OS and browser combination images that Microsoft encourages for the use of testers and developers (https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/). You'll want a selection of Windows 7, 8, and 10 hosts to play with for the sake of completeness; at various points in the book, it will make sense to try each of the multitude of browsers available (Internet Explorer/Edge, Firefox, Chrome, and so on). While the MSDN, Eval Center, and developer downloads will all work, for ease of setting up new environments, the latter approach sufficed for most of my preparatory work.

Mobile device operating systems can be run virtually with varying success, with iOS being the lone holdout (good luck getting iOS running virtually!) Most of our techniques will exploit the browsers alone, so using a browser plugin or developer tool configuration can do the trick. A quick search from Firefox or Chrome for user agent browser changer will yield tools that allow a desktop browser to emulate any number of other browsers, both mobile and desktop based. I used the Kali VM's Firefox or Iceweasel browser whenever possible, falling back on Chrome on the same VM or IE/Edge, Safari, or others on the appropriate Windows VM, or my laptop's browser as needed.