It’s fine and dandy upgrading software, but when a large percent of the world is going to be viewing your work in an older browser, it’d be rather nice to be able to keep it for testing. Unfortunately the most popular browser on the planet, Internet Explorer, doesn’t allow for multiple installations. Someone stumbled onto a way to have standalone versions of Internet Explorer. Since then the technique has been refined, now there are even installers! Keep in mind this is not supported by Microsoft and occasional errant behavior does take place, but all in all it is the easiest testing solution.

Free Virtualization for Windows

In mid July Microsoft released their MS Virtual PC 2004 SP1 for Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Server 2000/2003 as a free download. For those running Server 2000/2003 VMWare released their VMware Server for free recently as well.

If you have the hard drive space and RAM, this is the cleanest method of testing, however it can be a bit clumsy for common use. While using the ‘iexplore.exe.local’ solution is not 100% accurate it works well enough for most testing purposes. Downloads of these applications are available below.

IE 3-6 Client Packages For Windows

Update: Thanks to Mike Takahashi for pointing out you can now get full installers for IE3 IE4.01 IE5 IE5.5 and IE6 running in standalone mode at Tredosoft. It includes the conditional comment fixes we linked to before and corrected title bar entries. As IE7 as the root node wild card selector for IE only rules (* HTML) will be disabled in strict mode working conditional comments may be an important .

While Microsoft knows about this process it should not in any way be seen as supported by Microsoft or any other party.

Notes (mainly) from Skyzyx.com:

  • All: Trying to use the Favorites bar/menu will crash your system. Just try to avoid that.
  • All: I’ve heard about minor problems with PNGs, IE Filters, and some other obscure stuff. These should hopefully be fixed as soon as we can get around to it.
  • All: The “About” box lies. It will reflect the “real” version of Internet Explorer installed on your system. Check your Browser Information to see what version you’re running. Look for the version number right after the “MSIE”.
  • IE 4.x: The address bar doesn’t work. You must use File » Open…
  • IE 4.x: The internal version for Internet Explorer 4.01 was 4.72. Checking the version will display 4.72, but it was really 4.01.
  • IE 6 has occasional annoying security dialogue boxes.
Internet Explorer 7 [ Installer ]

You can either download and install the browser or extract the contents of the zip, create a blank “iexplore.exe.local” in that directory, then manually run the application. There is a walkthrough at Tredosoft

Older Builds

These packages have been tested in Windows XP and Server 2003, and should work in Windows 2000. If you want packages for Windows 9x or Me, they can be downloaded at Skyzyx.com.

Internet Explorer Server Side Solution

Dean Edwards has been working on a server side JavaScript app that aims to make IE 5.x render the same as IE 6.0x while fixing CSS rendering bugs with the aim of full CSS2 (and some CSS3) support. He called his project IE7 before it was announced that Microsoft was once again working on the browser, and that will probably change once it hits version 1.0. While this is obviously unsupported, his work is respected by the IE team and was announced by a lead programmer as a CSS compliance solution. As evidenced by a later blog entry the team is actively working with him.

The software is still in Alpha stages and isn’t recommended for production environments, but it could definitely make life a bit easier.

Netscape / Gecko Browsers for Windows

Netscape/Mozilla browsers are thankfully a bit easier to handle than Internet Explorer. You can go to the Netscape Browser Archive and easily install a 4.x browser (I simply chose 4.8), and choose either a NS 6 or 7 build and then the Mozilla equivalent of the other (eg download Netscape 6.2, then Mozilla 1.0.2 for Netscape 7.01 equivalency). Mozilla Firefox will handle Netscape 8.x rendering.

If you wish to have more versions available (to cover the changes made in the 7 series perhaps), you should create a new ‘profile’ for each installation (and of course choose custom install mode and install each in a unique directory). The following is from thesitewizard.com:

It is easy to make these versions of Netscape/Mozilla co-exist with each other. Install them into separate directories and create a different profile for each browser you install. (For non-Netscape/Mozilla users, this browser allows you to create different profiles so that you can store different settings for different situations.) To create a different profile, simply start up the Mozilla or Netscape Profile Manager, and answer the questions given by the wizard. Be sure you do this before you start configuring each browser, or the settings you make in one browser may bleed over to the other, and possibly confuse the other version.

Once you’ve finished creating profiles, you will want to create shortcuts (Windows terminology) to run the different versions of the browser. This makes life easier for you: you can simply click the appropriate icon for the different versions, and it will load using the correct profile. To specify which profile the browser is to load, put the profile name after the ”-P” option.

For example, if you have created a profile named “netscape6”, your command for running (say) Netscape with that profile may look like:

"C:\Program Files\Netscape\Netscape 6\netscp6.exe" -P netscape6

Similarly, your command to run Mozilla 1.4 with a profile called “mozilla” may look like:

"C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\Mozilla\mozilla.exe" -P mozilla

And so on.

Internet Based Screencapture Services

Dan Vine has an excellent site (free registration required – departments could create a shared user/pass if they wish) called iCapture where you can input a URL and view a screenshot of it being rendered in a recent Safari browser. He also has a site called ieCapture where you can view screenshots from multiple Windows based browsers, though it is not as stable or refined as the Macintosh solution.

Snugtech’s SafariTest allows you to take safari screenshots that doesn’t require registration (yet) and allows you to specify the resolution you want the screenshot taken at.

There are some fee based sites where you can subscribe for similar features across a wider variety of browsers, two of them are SiteVista and BrowserCam.