Simon Willison’s Weblog

Multiple Internet Explorers

7th November 2003

In possibly the best news web designers will hear this year, Joe Maddalone of Insert Title Web Designs has discovered a way of running multiple versions of Internet Explorer on one installation of Windows! The problem of testing in different versions of IE has plagued developers for years, and it’s fantastic to see a solution that doesn’t involve running multiple partitions with separate Windows installations or shelling out for VMWare or VirtualPC.

Unsurprisingly, Joe’s revelation is causing quite a stir in the web development community. Matthew Haughey is asking why Microsoft didn’t tell us about this themselves, Luke Redpath has released some funky coloured icons to distinguish between versions and Ryan Parman has taken the risky (from a bandwidth point of view) step of packaging the minimum files needed to run versions 5.01 and 5.5 up in to zip files. Amazingly, they’re 2.92 MB and 3.25 MB respectively. I’m running them now and they seem to work just fine—major kudos to Joe for the discovery, and Ryan for making it so easy to take advantage of.