Viewing your website in Internet Explorer can be full of unexpected surprises, especially when somebody else, or (oh my god!) the client discovers that your layout is breaking apart. To make testing a little bit simpler, I found out how to install several versions of IE on my local machine.
Multiple IEs on one machine
I recently had to make some browser testing and tried to figure out how I and if it is possbile to install multiple IE instances (meaning different versions) on my Windows machine. After some googeling I found a German site that offers download packages for the installation of IE 5.01 and IE 5.5 SP2, side by side. The only prerequisite is that IE 6 is already installed on the machine.
After downloading the ZIP-packages you can simply unzip them and run the respective exe-file within the folder. Internet Explorer launches, with the user interface from IE 6, but the engine behind is actualle IE 5.01 or IE 5.5, depending on whatever exe-file you executed. As it is pretty hard to recognize which of the installed version you are currently using (all have the same IE6-look-alike UI), you can drag a favlet to your bookmark-bar, which shows the browser version in the status bar. Very nice.
IE 7 standalone
This kept me busy recently as well, but fortunately Google helped me out again finding a site that describes in great detail how you can install IE 7 without the need of “losing” IE 6.