The latest release beta release of IE7 that coincided with MIX06 has, according to Markus Mielke over at IEBlog, now reached ‘layout complete’ stage. What this means as, Markus goes on to state, is that we can now start developing websites to be compliant with Microsoft’s much improved browser. Though still not perfect, Microsoft has increased the support for CSS and many of the work arounds previously needed for layout have been fixed. Its still not perfect though and there have been some reports of major websites breaking with this new browser.
So while there is now a period of at least three months to get what minor fixes implemented in new sites and whatever new fixes will be required there is an issue with running IE6 and IE7 on the same machine. IE7’s beta installs over IE6 which will be fine for the everyday user but for those who want to try it out first or developers who need to test on both browsers the official line has been to run Virtual Machine for this beta browser.
Well short of Microsoft releasing a stand alone IE7, which isn’t gonna happen, the alternative appears to be a simple batch file that Jon Galloway has written. By extracting the IE7 install exe (which is just an self extracting archive) into a directory and creating a batch file the program starts up and functions fully it would seem, without effecting the IE6 installation in anyway. The two programs even seem to function side by side without causing problems.
This does make temporary alterations to the registry though so I would advise backing up before running for the first time in case something goes wrong.
