There has been a lot of press the last few days on the upcoming new version of Internet Explorer. Most articles talk of new CSS and PNG support - however - I think one big thing is being overlooked.
One of the things I despised about IE, even when I used IE as my primary browser, was that there was no way (no simple way) to run multiple versions of the browser on one computer. Because of how deeply IE was tied to the system, once you upgraded, that was it - you were using the latest version of IE - and only that version.
Thats all fine and good for 99% of the public out there - but for web developers - it is a royal pain in the rear. It means we have to either jump through hoops, or use multiple computers, to test our sites on multiple versions of IE.
I can certainly understand Microsoft's decision to do this - however - it does kinda screw over web developers.
Just to be clear - I don't blame just Microsoft in this regard. For too many years now I've felt that the browser makers haven't done the best they could to support the folks who actually built web sites. Consider the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox. This sort of tool should have been around back in the wild 1.0 days. The simple ability to disable/enable JS in one click is obvious - and should have been this easy in the beginning.
Of course - these tools would do nothing but confuse end users. I wouldn't expect them to be turned on by default. But it would have been nice to have the option at least.
Of course, I shouldn't complain. I still remember working with Netscape 4 alphas that required me to reboot my machine when I made a simple mistake in JavaScript. ;)
Archived Comments
Ray,
This is something I have been raising hell about for years also.
Personally my dream would be (and here it is all you geeks out, a great a program to sell to webdeveloper) to have a program that mimiced every webbrowser out there in one application. This way you could write your code in once and view it amongst all the diferent browser types. And yeah I know there are some applications that claim to do it, however I haven't seen one yet that gives me, a windows user, the ability to see what my webpage looks like on a Mac browser like Safari.
Whatever happened with that EOLAS thing where they released a temp browser; and people freaked out because you could run a different version of IE from a folder?
funnily enough I've just spent this morning building multiple Virtual Machines so i can test sites againsts different IEs...you try finding IE 5.5 on the MS site these days, it just ain't there!! In the end i found it on an MSDN CD but I did find this site,
http://www.skyzyx.com/downl...
which suggests that it has 'standalone' versions of IE for side by side user on the same PC - use as own risk!
jb.
We found a way to easily run multiple versions of IE on the same box. We can dump folders containing IE 5 and 5.5 into anywhere on our local disks and run them w/o a hitch, all while having IE 6 installed as the default version. I can't remember where I found the how-to for it, but it's amazingly easy to do. I'll see if I can find it and post it here later.
This is a <em>very</em> legitimate concern Ray, considering IE7 is supposedly only being made available to XPSP2 users. Heck, lots of my corporate clients are on Win2K still.
I've seen workarounds similar to what Steve listed above, but it's messy and MS keeps mum on such matters, which is downright mean of them.
After being bitten hard by IE last night on a project, I can't say I'm thrilled with having to support 2 versions of it now.
I've used the multiple versions of IE in folders for over a year now. Never had a problem, and it's great for testing CSS compatibility.
johnb , as far as finding old browsers, check out: http://browsers.evolt.org/
I think this is where I got the versions and instructions: http://www.quirksmode.org/b...
Could not be simpler. Download, extract somewhere and run. The caveat is that the version of IE listed in the registry shows up when you go to Help/About.
Download any/all of them (vers 3-5.5) and test them on a CSS site (if you want to see something truly ugly). :)
Are we talking about something like this
http://labs.insert-title.co...
http://www.quirksmode.org/b...
Yeah! I've been working with these for quite some time and it works great.
Personally Ray, I think the RSS support looks very interesting.