Multiple Versions of IE

Thanks mate... Surely will help

I've stickied this one as it will certainly come in handy. I'm not sure how other people here have installed multiple IEs - whether from the site you linked or a different one - perhaps they could post their sites as well, so we have a big resource?

I usually store old versions of everything on my harddrive but having this helps a lot I have to say.

Cheers...

I agree this is a great solution, but from my experience it isn't perfect. There are lots of problems with saving cookies and I have had a great deal of strange problems using JavaScript frameworks like MooTools where certain methods wouldn't work. A full install of IE6 on XP, when tested, had none of these problems.

Just thought you should know...

Yes. Get one of the free virtualisation packages and run each of the non-standard versions of IE within its own VM.

What are the free virtualization packages? Also, I use Fusion at work and Parallels at home, do these solutions work on XP in that environment too?

Unfortunately, those two aren't free (except for a short trial period). Windows users do get free options, VMWare certainly do some. I think Microsoft and XenSource do too. Linux has free options from VMWare, XenSource and possibly some others.

Microsoft have released Virtual PC as a free download in which you can build virtual machines, have had to use it on a Vista workstation as IE6 standalones will not run under Vista

Thanks Erox for the original link! I just used it to add IE6 to a machine that primarily uses IE7. I tried adding some others but IE5.5 below just crash instantly everytime. Lucky I don't particularly intend to test against them anyway

J

P.S. It's really interesting just flicking between sites with them both running on IE6 and IE7 repectably... This site alone loses the line which connects the tabs 'All recent posts' and 'My recent posts' to one another and to the edge of the screen...

Alright, well since I have Parallels running XP and it has IE7 installed. Is there a way to run one of those free windows virtualization programs inside xp that has IE6 installed or if I have Vista running with IE7 can I use a one of those programs to run IE6?

No. But you can run multiple VMs at the same time from the primary OS. At least that is what I do with Fusion.

I setup the initial XP installation and patched it (without accepting IE7). I then backed up that VM as pristine. Made two copies, one for IE6 and in the other I accepted the IE7 update. Fwiw, I did the same with Win95 to get two other (rarely used) VMs for IE5 and IE5.5.

Yeah, right now I have two VMs XP (IE6) and Vista (IE7), but I was trying to figure out a reasonable way to run both inside one VM. Thank you though.

Roscoe, your probably better to keep them seperate VM images..

1. You can freeze the state of each vm machine, so you can jump right back to the site your looking at
2. you can be definate that your viewing it correct - with multi ie's on one machine, don't you mess up condcom statements and the like to the highest version?

Do you know how to install different versions of the same version. IE7 three years ago is different than IE7 now. I have been creating for the latest version and find my work differs on older IE7 versions.
John

IEtester works pretty well for me. Has 5/6/7/8 avalable as tabs in the same window. Keep meaning to try MultipleIE, so not sure which is better.