I can’t imagine why, but over half of the world’s web surfing population is still using old versions of Internet Explorer (IE) - most running the Windows XP  bundled Internet Explorer 5 (IE5), Internet Explorer 5.5 (IE5.5), Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and the various Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 or 2 versions (IE6-SP1, IE6-SP2). Some of the users may even be using Internet Explorer with some add-on version that makes it feel a bit more sane, like the ultra-popular Maxthon browser project, some don’t even know feel was based on Internet explorer 6. And so, the average web-developer has no choice but to make sure that the website constructed runs smoothly on Internet Explorer, even though it doesn’t follow many of the web developing standards and often contain some extremely annoying bugs.

Problem is, web developers are usually tech-savvy and have at least Internet Explorer 7 (I hope not), if not being devoted Firefox users, maybe Opera or - more likely - Safari on their Apple. The task of testing out your newly constructed website on Internet Explorer thus becomes a bit more difficult - you’ll need to have some sort of a Windows machine that will run all Internet Explorer versions on the same machine for you. Here are a few solutions you might find handy for doing that :

The official Microsoft solution is to run an IE6, IE7 virtual machine through VPC :

Many of you have asked how to run IE6 and IE7 in a side by side environment. As Chris Wilson blogged about early this year, it’s unfortunately not so easy to do. There are workarounds, but they are unsupported and don’t necessarily work the same way as IE6 or IE7 would work when installed properly. As Chris said, the best way to use multiple versions of IE on one machine is via virtualization. Microsoft has recently made Virtual PC 2004 a free download; we’ve taken advantage of that by releasing a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to help facilitate your testing and development. The image is time bombed and will no longer function after April 1, 2007.

So, you can download VPC 2004 for free and then download the virtual machines that include IE6 or IE7.

Another solution, which is what I’m using on my Windows machine, is having all the Internet Explorer version installed together. This is actually trickier than you think, but there are a few folks that have made this whole procedure a lot easier to deal with. Here’s from the wonderful Tredosoft:

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. [...]

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. [...]

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

How simple is that? download it from the Tredosoft page.

If you’re not into all that, then there’s a website that claims to let you see a webpage in various browser platforms, called NetRenderer. It will let you see your website with Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 5.5, a mixed or difference version of IE6 and IE7. It sometimes works, sometimes not quite. Hardly perfect, but call be a quick solution to the ones not wanting to struggle too much with installs.

Know of any other interesting solutions to this issue? drop me a note…