Leap of Faith (squared)

October 27, 2006

I finally installed the new versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox today. I’ve been avoiding the update, amid all the grumbling in the web-developing community about how they each overwrite their previous version. I figured it might be a good idea to let the more adventurous folks experiment with options for hacking in parallel installations, before I burned any bridges I didn’t have to. After a lot of poking around, here’s what I was able to find:

Firefox

This one proved to be a piece of cake, thanks to Stuart Colville. In XP, simply download and install Firefox portable, port over your user profile, and then install version 2.

The only drawback is that (on windows) you cannot run the two at the exact same time. That was easier than I expected; let’s see how well our favorite Microsoft application complied.

Internet Explorer

This one didn’t look so easy. At first, I could only find comments on various articles saying “try this, I would expect it to work” posted by folks who were apparently not quite daring enough to try out their methods their own machines. I let another several days pass, and then poked around again to see what kind of solutions had presented themselves.

I came across an IE7 Standalone Launch Script, and another one over here but it was (a) primarily for the beta release (at the time), and (b) somewhere in there I came across a comment about how without a full IE7 install, you could conceivably wind up with a strange version 6/7 hybrid installed on your machine *shudder*. That certainly defeats the purpose of testing for webpage development.

The most promising solution I found came up in the comments of a post over on Robert Nyman’s site: go ahead with a full install of 7.0, and then add in a standalone of version 6. Tredosoft.com has a really nifty multiple-version application allowing you to install all major releases of IE since version 3. So I downloaded the full meal-deal from Microsoft and let the installation commense. (And let me tell you, IE7 is ugly… what’s with the menu bar being under the address bar? And why is it hidden by default?)

For the most part, Tredosoft’s installation works. However, it won’t handle cookies, so if you need to do testing on a page with a user logon, this isn’t going to be your ultimate solution. But at least it’s better than nothing.

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