Install IE 7 and keep IE 6 25May07

As every web developer knows (or should know), testing your work across all major web browsers is part of doing business. My own setup is primarily on OS X using Safari and Firefox, but I also keep Parallels open running Windows XP and IE 6 to quickly catch problems.

But there’s one browser missing—IE 7. Yeah, it’s supposed to be much more in-tune with the rest of the browser world when it comes to supporting web standards, but it’s still lagging behind and buggy. Up until Vista was released I could pretty well ignore IE 7, but those days are gone.

So… just install IE 7 in XP and everything will be fine, right? Wrong. Installing IE 7 deletes IE 6, which is still the dominant Windows browser to test against. I could install a second build of XP as a separate virtual machine in Parallels, but thanks to Microsoft’s draconian activation scheme, that won’t work. Buy Vista? I could, but come on. Plunk down nearly two hundred bucks just to use IE 7?
There has to be a better way. Thankfully, there is.

Like the old days of evolt.org’s browser archive, enterprising developers have built a standalone installer for old versions of IE. Here’s how it works — you install IE 7 through Windows Update, which will remove IE 6 from XP. You then download and run the aforementioned installer, and choose what version of IE you want to bring back to life — IE 6, IE 5.5, IE 5 and/or IE 4. I went ahead and installed them all.

The result? Five flavors of IE in XP, each running side by side without any code overlap or problems so far as I can see.

Text © Todd Dominey 2007

via What Do I Know