Running Multiple IE Versions
My last post mentioned that Firefox 2 is now out, but that’s actually not the only big browser release that’s happened recently. In fact, Internet Explorer 7 is now out and available. In most web development circles, Internet Explorer is almost despised for it’s rendering quirks, lack of standards support, and general pain to work with. IE7 goes a long way to addressing those issues, making it a pretty reasonable browser for which to design.
One of the problems with a release like this in which so much is fixed and improved is that for quite a while both IE6 and IE7 are going to be used extensively by various people (and that’s not even mentioning IE5 and IE5.5, which still see use, too). When you’re developing a site you’re going to want to test it in both IE6 and IE7, but you can only have one of the two browsers installed at a time. So, what can you do about that?
Luckily for us, the folks over at Microsoft have heard our pleas and there’s a solution. The short version is that you can install Virtual PC 2004 (which is now available as a free download) and use a newly-available “VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit”. So, install IE7 like normal and then run a second—virtual—instance of Windows that has IE6. I have yet to try it myself and I admit that it seems slightly clunky, but I think it’s great that something like this is being made available to us.
Posted Saturday December 2, 2006 in by Chris Curtis
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I ended up doing this at work “manually” around a month ago. The machine they sent me as a testing platform had a volume licence edition of XP on it, so i installed it for a second time in a vpc enviroment and updated IE to 7 inside the install. I would have done it the other way around (the hdd install with ie7 and the virtual with ie6), but the U.S. Governments official browser is still IE6, and that is what i have to make sure everything works in.
If you dont have access to a volume copy of windows, then their sp2 ie6 image works. One word of caution though, IT WILL ONLY WORK UNTIL APRIL 1, 2007. After that, it is no longer activated.
By Greg Ferrell on December 5, 2006 at 05:41am link