12.03.06
IE6 and IE7, Side By Side
One of the banes of web developers’ existence is when a new version of Internet Explorer gets released. That’s because you can only run version of IE on your machine at a time, yet for some months after the release date the responsible web dev is obliged (sometime contractually) to build sites that work and look right proper in both the outgoing version and the new version. And those versions never, ever, ever work the same when it comes to client-side code.
In the past, one had to rely on kindly maniacs who managed to cobble together some sort of stand-alone approximation of the outgoing version that would run on a system running the current (new) version. There’s been a couple problems with that: there’s no real guarantee the fakey standalone really worked exactly like the IE version it was approximating (which is critical when coping with, say, CSS or DOM anomalies) and, perhaps more importantly, god only knows what the thing might do to your box. And nevermind worries about virii. Heavy sigh. Where I work, we’ve been leaning toward installing a local VMWare instance of Windows running IE6 just for this purpose. Less disaster-prone, perhaps, but no less a pain (not to say that VMWare doesn’t rock — it definitely does). And then there’s the OS licensing thing. MS is a little picky about that.
Well, after seven-ish years and 2 browsers versions of that nonsense, Microsoft has seen some kinda light and made available to the dev community an actual, gen-yoo-ine, sanctioned standalone of IE6. The catch? It’s still a Virtual PC image, but hey at least it’s sanctioned, right?
Anyway, get all the details from “IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine” on the official IEBlog.
(Um…but is anyone else besides me slightly unnerved by an MS widget that “time-bombs” on April Fools Day? I’m just askin’.)
Thanks to B.F. for the refer.
