Testing multiple versions of Internet Explorer

We all know how completely un-awesome Internet Explorer 6 is and how un-wonderfully it complies to all those standards and stuff. As website designers, the world would be a much happier place if everyone was using Firefox or at least IE7, but unfortunately the world is a miserable place with millions of people still trolling around the internets with the now very outdated Internet Explorer 6.

Unfortunately for us, each verison of Internet Explorer uses the same resources to get the job done which means installing multiple versions is impossible. Or so I thought.

Standalone browsers

These look to be fantastic as they don’t overwrite any of the system files that your main browser uses. What this means is that you are effectively testing a fresh copy of IE6 (or earlier if you really feel the need) on the same system as IE7 or IE8.

You can grab the standalone installers from here -> http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone

A note on Vista

After fishing around for a very long time, it apppears that the only way to test in IE6 on a Windows Vista machine is to run a Virtual System. Microsoft has a full set of instructions on how to set this up.