I have a laptop and a desktop. I am using Internet Exporer 7 on my laptop and Internet Explorer 6 on my desktop. I didn’t want to update my desktop’s IE6 to IE7 because when I install IE7, it is going to replace IE6 with it. So I can only have one version of Internet Explorer installed in Windows.
Sometimes I have to test websites in various versions of Internet Explorer. I noticed that IE7 render webpages a bit differently than IE6 and older versions. If I need to test a website using IE7, I will use my laptop and if I need to test a website using IE6, that will be done on my desktop.
Definitely troublesome! I did a little bit of research to ease this problem and found many different type of methods and hacks to run IE6 and IE7 together. Finally, I found the ultimate solution for me to run multiple versions of IE from IE 3.0 to IE 6.0 on my computer without deleting, modifying or hacking any files.
Actually enabling multiple IE to run on one system is quite complicated. Someone suggested that an installer would be great to automate the whole process. Hence, Yousif from TredoSoft created an installer called Multi IE that enables you to install IE 3, IE 4.01, IE 5, IE,5.5, and IE6 on your computer without modifying your default IE7 browser files.
You can run any version of IE from version 3 to 6 from your Start Menu, Desktop or Quick Launch bar.
See how easy it is to have so many versions of Internet Explorer in one machine?
Sometimes IE5, IE5.5 and IE6 crash unexpectedly. I don’t think it matters much because we only use it for testing purposes and not for daily web browsing. As for Windows Vista, unfortunately Multiple IE installer won’t work on it. Mike says that the only way to currently run it under Vista is to use Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. Go here for how to do it.