Now that the IE7 Beta 2 Preview is available to the public it is a good idea for web developers to start looking at how their web sites render in IE 7. In the past one could always run standalone copies of IE with the latest version of the browser. Unfortunately, the IE6 Cumulative Security Update broke the IE standalone mode causing all kinds of problems. The current IE 7 beta release does include an uninstall, which will return your machine to its previous version of IE, but this is no help to web developers who want to prepare for IE 7 but still need a solid copy of IE6 on their machines for development purposes.

Thanks to Jon Galloway, we can now run IE7 in standalone mode while keeping IE6 as the main IE version. Run IE7 as standalone and keep IE6 as the default browser. Visit Jon’s web site for more information and the script necessary to accomplish this. Basically many of the non-browsing features do not work but it is quire handy to browse and test websites. In addition, justaddwater has reported that “If I start IE6 before IE7, I cannot use the address bar in IE6 (as this loads the page in Firefox which is my default browser). The workaround for me is to start IE7, and then start IE6. Now I can see a web page in IE7 and IE6 side-by side.” Remember this solution is unsupported and thus may cause problems, but many have reported it working so far.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2006 at 9:47 am and is filed under Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.