Last updated on February 5, 2020
I while back I wrote about running multiple versions of IE on the same machine for website testing purposes and the problems I was having with Vista.
The solution I suggested was to run Virtual PC with a copy of XP and IE6.
Last month Virtual PC 2007 came out of beta and so far it seems pretty good.
For all you web developers who have just bought a new computer with Vista pre-installed then Microsoft have released Internet Explorer 6 Application Compatibility VPC Image which is a VirtualPC hard disk image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit.
I don’t say this often but, well done Microsoft.
What’s so well done about over 600MB download to get IE6 working? 😀
I’m downloading it right now but I certainly aren’t happy about how they decided to solve the problem.
I’d say well done when IE 7 completes acid2 far enoug to see that there really is a yellow face and not just some random graphics.
We shouldn’t be needing to test our sites in older versions. What do you thing?
I certainly think so. I still find a lot of people running IE6 here in South Africa.
Yeah its nice – but it is set to auo expire december 2007. what will we do after this?
i just built a site for a client and they viewed it on ie6 – demolished. embarassing to say the least. i have no way of testing on ie6. i have a mac and a vista machine. what was microsoft thinking?
This is an outrage, every decent designer knows IE6 is still the most common used browser in the world. I’m currently working on a project and I had some complains about IE6 incompatibility, now I have no way to find out what is wrong or to check the errors.
Shame on you microsoft,
I’m now using Windows XP on my main development machine with IE7 and FF. I also have a VirtualPC setup on that machine with a copy of Windows XP with IE6. Works for me. I’m probably going back to running Vista soon and I will continue to use the same Virtual PC then.
I use a mac and bought a cheap PC just for testing purposes. It came loaded with Vista Home Basic, and now I come to find that VPC doesn’t work on it! I need to plunk down another $200 to get Vista Ultimate! What is the point in that?
I’m lucky in that I have a desktop running XP and a laptop running Vista. It would be convienient to test on the laptop while developing on the desktop. Maybe I’ll try this Virtual image route, but surely it would be easier to simply have a standalone IE6 as you can have on XP?
One thing concerning using virtual pc on a vista home premium os: It is not supported and as of now I am having trouble getting it to work.
Virtual PC is supported for vista business, ultimate and enterprise.
Stop ur winging and get on with ur sites, VPC only take 10 mins to DL and install / setup
and you dont need to worry about it conflicting with anything as its ‘virtual’ this is the best solution, imagine having ie 6, 7 & 8…9…10 together on the same PC ! – not good
🙂
Hi all. I’ve come across a website that promotes an IE toolbar allowing you to view websites as if you are using IE 5.5, 6 and 7. Perfect. Have a look
http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage