j’s scratchpad

One of the great things about having a weblog is that I can occasionally use it to make notes about something I want to remember later. Another great thing about having a weblog is that when those notes might be helpful to other people, I can share them.

Properly testing Web pages in mutliple incarnations of Internet Explorer is tricky because, unlike several other browsers, different versions don’t want to get along on the same machine. To get them to work together, I followed Jon Galloway’s instructions. They worked ok. I had the problem he describes where URLs open in Firefox instead of IE6 (go figure). Running both browsers together is much easier than installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling the browsers in order to test in the various flavors.

There came a time today when we hypothesized problems created by running the browsers together on the same machine were interfering with the what we were trying to test, so I had to figure out how to go back to running just Internet Explorer 6. Easy, right? Just go to the Add/Remove Programs panel and take out IE7, right? It wasn’t on the list.

I removed enough pieces of Jon’s suggested installation that I could install IE7 from a new download. After that, it appeared on the Add/Remove Programs panel. Once I took it out, IE6 came back. I ran the ie7fix script he wrote to straighten out the registry key. So far, so good.

I have a feeling I’ll be trying to run both browsers again at some point and will have forgotten what I did and how to get back to just having one version of IE.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.