Sep 05 2008
Installing Internet Explorer 6 on Windows Vista
Although the title of this post leads you to believe that you will be able to install Internet Explorer 6 on your Windows Vista, this is not exactly what we will be doing. Will you be able to view your websites on ie6? Yes, of course but not through Windows Vista, let me explain.
Internet Explorer 6 and earlier versions can not run on Windows Vista. There are several blogs on the web that explain why so I will not get into the why. The reasons are beyond the scope of this post and irrelevant to our purpose.
So, first things first. I will assume that you have xampp installed on your computer in order to view the websites you are working on before you publish them. If you are not, if you are using other type of server-loke software keep reading since you might be able to get something out of this. If you are not doing either then, shame on you. Every webmaster should make sure his/her website works before uploading to a live server.
For more information about Xampp click here. This is a free download so go ahead and install it.
Now in order to run ie6 on Windows Vista (sort of). We need to download and install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. You can visit their website by clicking here or you can click here to visit the download page.This software is also free. Download and install it. Now, here is the tricky part and most likely where most of you will stop reading and say: “the #$%^ with this…”. You need to install a legal copy of Windows XP on this Virtual PC. You can view a post on installing Windows XP on a Virtual Machine by clicking here. It is really simple.
Now that you have your new Windows XP running on your Virtual Machine. You can install multiple versions of IE on your PC. Either visit Tredosoft.com (click here) or begin the download by clicking here. This software will allow you to run Internet Explorer versions 3.0, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0 on your PC. I strongly suggest that you visit the site to learn more about their software.
Ok, now that everything is running smooth on your PC, we still have to view our websites from our local server on our new Virtual Machine. First, if you have not set up a domain yet on your PC you should. This will allow you to see your site by typing http://www.example.com/yourwebsite/ as opposed to http://127.0.0.1/yourwebsite/ or http://localhost/yourwebsite/. Here’s how to do it. On your host computer, with a text editor (I recommend Notepad ++) edit C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. Add the following lines to the end of the file:
127.0.0.1 www.example.com # For browser access
127.0.0.1 mail.example.com # For email access
127.0.0.1 example.com # For mercury mail server
Now, you will notice that when trying to view your webpages on your Virtual Machine using the URL above you get a “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” message. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this post. In order access your pages we need to make sure that your Virtual Machine is communicating with your host computer.
On your host computer, go to Start and type “CMD” without the quotes of course. This will bring C:\WINDOWS\System32\CMD.exe. Now type “ipconfig”, again without the quotes. This will give you the IP address of your computer.
Now, on your Virtual Machine, edit the same file we edit on your host machine: C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. Now instead of 127.0.0.1 use your IP address.
your.IP.address.here www.example.com # For browser access
your.IP.address.here mail.example.com # For email access
your.IP.address.here example.com # For mercury mail server
That is all. You should be able to see your sites on your Virtual Machine by using the above URL on Internet Explorer 6 and the earlier versions installed with the Multiple IE program. You could also install other versions of Firefox and other browsers that you would like to test your sites on.
