Free help with multiple versions of Internet Explorer
A key part of our quality control is to check a site and/or templates with different versions of a range of browsers. However it’s virtually impossible to run different versions of Internet Explorer (IE) on a single copy of Windows and to know that what you’re seeing is the behaviour in more normal circumstances. Windows and IE are very tightly integrated, so there isn’t even an ‘uninstall’ option available if you wanted to remove it from your computer.
One way around this is to have virtual copies of Windows running on your computer, each with their own single, different version of IE. Microsoft have such a product and have now made Virtual PC 2004 free to download (Virtual PC 2007 version has gone into beta testing, so that’ll be the version that you’d have to pay for in the future). To run it you’ll need a reasonable chunk of memory (after all you’re running another copy of Windows inside your normal Windows), either Windows XP Professional or 2000 Professional (Home versions of either won’t work), and a license for another copy of Windows (the one that’ll be installed in the Virtual PC).
You can also get a free, time-limited version of XP with IE6 (Service Pack 2) set up from Microsoft as well. So you can upgrade your normal desktop browser to IE7 & then use this version to check that your pages still look fine in IE6. They’re intending to put another time-limited version up before this one expires, so you’ll need to update your copy every now & then. Obviously Microsoft don’t want to be giving away copies of XP at the moment.
If you’re looking to go further back in time then you’ll have to use earlier versions of Windows as you can’t install anything earlier than IE6 on XP. So you’ll need to use:
- Windows 98 (the original version not Second Edition) for IE4
- Windows 2000 for IE5
- Windows 2000 for IE5.5 (you upgrade from version 5 to 5.5 and you can find the appropriate files at the evolt.org browser archive - a good place to get other past versions of browsers)
- Windows XP or Vista for IE7
If you want to go the whole hog (as we do) then you’ll also want to have a duplicate of the same version of IE that you use normally but with the default settings (you might have changed them for your day-to-day work). For IE6 you could also have versions with and without Service Pack 2 applied. This was the update that put in the extra security features such as the pop-up blocker so it shouldn’t make a difference to how your website looks, but you might find differences in how it works.
The same technique can be used on other systems - I use Parallels Desktop for Mac as Microsoft’s Virtual PC for Mac doesn’t work on the new Intel systems (but that is a good option if you’re on a PowerPC Mac).
