Is it possible to degrade from Internet Explorer 7 to Internet Explorer 6 for debugging purposes?

Question

I'm having Internet Explorer 6 problems on one of my sites, and I really wish I had it installed instead of Internet Explorer 7. Is there a quick way to do this?

Answer 1

Multiple IE:

It is possible to run Internet Explorer in standalone mode without having to over-write previous versions thanks to Joe Maddalone who came up with a way of achieving that in November 2003. Basically, Internet Explorer is run by exploiting a known workaround to DLL hell - which was introduced in Windows 2000 and later versions - called DLL redirection.

Manfred Staudinger perfected the standalone versions by adding IE version numbers to the title bar of the standalone browser window. Moreover, by removing the "IE" key in the registry subkey [HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector] Internet Explore defaulted to respecting conditional comments based on the version number prebuilt in the program.

It is not difficult to follow the instructions and get any version of IE running in standalone along side other versions. Most of you probably know of evolt's archive of Internet Explorer which has them readily packaged in ZIP files. Now suppose you want to download them all. An installer that would conveniently automate the whole process would be great. Thanks to this comment for the idea.

So I made an installer which contains IE3 IE4.01 IE5 IE5.5 and IE6...

Answer 2

Download Microsoft VirtualPC. Then download any of the files in Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image. The second download contains four VHD (virtual hard drive) files which have:

• XP SP2
  • IE 7
• XP SP3
  • IE 6, IE 8 Beta 2
• Vista SP1
  • IE 7

Answer 3

Download Virtual PC and set up a bunch of them for testing with various browsers/OS's. Once set up, this makes it trivial to test on IE6,7 and 8, various Firefox flavours, Konqueror, Opera, Safari, etc...

See Samuel's answer for a helpful VPC image in getting this started:

Answer 4

I recommend always testing your sites using BrowserShots. You can see how your site looks across multiple browsers, with multiple versions, on multiple operating systems. You can do something like 50 tests a day on their free service.

Answer 5

Also check out IETester, which gives you 5.5, 6, 7, 8b2 in one app.

Answer 6

Litmus is another BrowserShots-esque service.

Answer 7

This works fine for me: Multiple IE

Edit: looks like the minute it took me to find the URL was enough for 3 people to beat me to it..wow

Answer 8

IETester is pretty good, compare IE5.5/IE6/IE7/IE8 side by side.