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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Multiple Internet Explorers

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.

Posted 7th November 2003 at 12:46 am

This is Multiple Internet Explorers by Simon Willison, posted on 7th November 2003.

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15 comments

  1. I'm sure the story got mixed up somehow. I'll bet 'Glaz' was the one who did this first. I'll go check his loser list and see....Hold on.

    neverFails - 7th November 2003 01:50 - #

  2. This is big. Oh man, this is BIG. An enormous hurdle for web developers is now behind us. I can't believe someone didn't discover this earlier, but I am greatful that someone finally did!

    Ok, now the pessimist in me wonders if this is going to hold back standards adoptance in some ways as developers are reintroduced to the quirks of IE4/IE5.

    MikeyC - 7th November 2003 02:25 - #

  3. This man is worth being slashdotted ^__^

    I rather think/hope that discovery will tend to spawn better and slower degradation of the Standard Compliant websites. Now that we can easily test the CSS hacks and other workaround, the quality of the websites in outdated browsers should increase alas it may be at the cost of seeing people keeping those browsers.

    P01 - 7th November 2003 02:42 - #

  4. Now all we need is a nice IE 'suite' that works on linux, and I can finally move my developing platform to the dark side ;)

    Andrew Donaldson - 7th November 2003 08:39 - #

  5. Now I may be confused but wasn't the idea that Internet Explorer is inseperable from the Operating System an argument used by Microsoft to argue why it bundles it with Windows? This seems to say different.

    Harry Fuecks - 7th November 2003 09:54 - #

  6. I'm not sure what you mean by a IE 'suite', but it is possible to run all IE under Linux through Wine, and mulitple versions just like Windows too, as shown in this screenshot I took.

    Daniel - 7th November 2003 11:07 - #

  7. There are disavantages to running it under WINE as opposed to something like VMWare though. Apart from the fact you could be hunting for workarounds to bugs that only appear under WINE, you can't be sure that the rendering is identical. For instance, the screenshots you post look like the text is anti-aliased, but I wouldn't have expected that from a genuine Internet Explorer rendering.

    Jim Dabell - 7th November 2003 11:33 - #

  8. For instance, the screenshots you post look like the text is anti-aliased, but I wouldn't have expected that from a genuine Internet Explorer rendering.

    Huh? Anti-aliasing has been available in IE since -- well, since it's been available in Windows, which was sometime around Win98SE. I think it's on by default in XP. Why wouldn't you expect it?

    Jordan - 7th November 2003 18:00 - #

  9. OK, so if I have a Mac with Virtual PC, I can view a page in the browser that 99% of my users will be using all from one computer. I like that idea. Time to go install this hack on Virtual PC. :-)

    Scott Johnson - 7th November 2003 19:17 - #

  10. This technique seems identical to a post on a forum on webmasterworld.com around a month ago. I wonder why it's only really been picked up in the past few days through this post on insert-title.com... The original post on the forum thread didn't seem to generate much interest across weblogs.

    Phil - 7th November 2003 21:07 - #

  11. Phil,

    Publishing is fickle like that. I could do something fantastic and not get the word out to the right people, and it'd be a non-event. Like certain previous standards proposals others have made. Feature-based content-negotiation, anyone?

    Jarvik published a Minimal Spanning Tree algorithm in Checkoslovakian quite a long time before Prim republished the algorithm in English. The algorithm is known as Prim's, and usually the mention of Jarvik is a side note.

    It's a good life-lesson in politics and fame.

    Jeremy Dunck - 7th November 2003 22:19 - #

  12. To backup Ryan Parman, here is another archive of all the IE versions http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/

    Stephen DesRoches - 10th November 2003 21:09 - #

  13. A fantastic addition to the life of a cross-browser spod like me. Now all I need is a batch file that prompts me for a URL, then opens that URL in IE 5, 5.5 and 6... all that lets me down is complete ignorance. Anyone?

    Matt Lindop - 10th December 2003 11:29 - #

  14. Does not really work. It opens IE 5 or IE 4 program but go out to a site that can detect your browser and it shows up as the current version bound with windows .. in my case IE 6

    Kevin - 23rd December 2003 19:23 - #

  15. Man liekas, ka tas viss ir baigaa huijnja.....

    A. Ziverts - 7th November 2004 19:20 - #

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