Running Old Internet Explorer Browsers Alongside IE7

written 15 Jan 2007 while the sun tried, at least, rising

Two versions of IE side by side There are at least a half a dozen ideas out there for running differnet versions of Internet Explorer alongside of eachother – typically focused on running IE6 and IE7 simultaneously now that Internet Explorer has been released and is gaining market share very quickly.

Thus far I’ve found the best, and by far the easiest, way is to simply download this ZIP file (10Mb).

Unzip the file and you’re left with three folders and three shortcut icons, which allow you to launch Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 5.5 or Internet Explorer 6, all right alongside IE7 (you should first install IE7 before doing any of this.)

Ms. Yummy Wakame shared this with me awhile ago, but it seems to be a well kept secret.

Filed Under: how-tos & web design (ing)

9 Comments
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9 people chatting it up...

For heavens sake, MS have released a free VPC image that allows you to run Windows XP with IE6 in a virtual machine – the virtual machine host programme is also free. Why mess around with illegal hacks that will break things in the background when you can do things the easy and legal way.

BTW, your blog doesn’t work in IE7.

- Sam Spade | 10:53pm 15 Jan 07
Hi Sam, sorry I wasn’t aware that Microsoft had released all of that fancy virtual machine stuff and added all of that foreign “me” syntax to its programs.

As for doing things the “easy” way – well, if Microsoft was interested in me doing that they wouldn’t have made it so damned difficult to make websites work in IE in the first place…

And I guess I’m just a bit of a Robin Hood when it comes to what is or isn’t legal – finding solutions to right the injustices of head-in-their-ass almight corporations who can’t adhere to common standards that don’t involve throwing more of their garbage onto my hard drive seems like a good thing to me, regardless of your judgement of the legality of it all.

But thanks for the heads up with my blog and it not working – I guess the only thing is that I’m writing this comment via IE7 right about now and everything looks hunky-dorry to me – perhaps your IE7 has been corrupted by all of those virtual machines you’re rolling with?

Thanks for stopping by!

- nathan | 01:15am 16 Jan 07
hahahahaha…. perhaps they have.

i too, see no problem with your site in IE7.

- bob | 11:32pm 21 Jan 07
Interesting, thanks. These versions still identify themselves to the web as IE 7, which makes using them to sort out IE

- Aaron | 06:58am 11 Oct 07
What do you mean? I fear your comment was cut off or something…

- nathan | 10:54am 11 Oct 07
Your site looks great to me.

I too am more fond of the Robin Hood style hacks over installing lots of complicated development environments. I noticed recently that the ie versions you can install to a dir have stopped working after an install of ie8, it’s like MS are actually trying to get in the way of web designers.

- Daniel | 10:06am 9 Dec 08
Just noticed but that link doesn’t work anymore, please could you repost?

- Daniel | 10:09am 9 Dec 08
Hi Daniel and alas, it looks like that link is bunk.

I believe you might have some luck here though.

- nathan | 01:35pm 10 Dec 08
Yes, already found that but wasn’t sure if it was the same thing you were talking about.

- Daniel Cottrell | 02:28pm 10 Dec 08