Internet Explorer painkillers

This post is more than 16 years old.

Posted at 13:00 on 18 August 2008

Approximately 25% or so of the general population still use IE6, and can't or won't upgrade to IE7 for various reasons such as slow Internet connections, old computers, corporate security policies etc. For those of us who build websites that still have to support them, here are a couple of essential downloads that can make life much easier for us:

IE7-js is a JavaScript library that makes IE6 and IE5.5 behave like IE7, fixing most of the HTML and CSS issues that stand in the way of standards compliance. There is also a script that makes IE7 behave like IE8. Should make it much easier to support those older browsers, though I doubt if it will eliminate the need for testing altogether. For that, you will need...

Multiple IE which allows you to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer side by side on the same Windows installation. It includes versions 3, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5 and 6 in a single installation package and it is very easy to set up. Unfortunately, it only works on Windows XP: trying to get IE6 to run in Windows Vista is, apparently, very painful.