Archive for March 12th, 2007

Run IE6 and IE7 together – IE6 standalone version

Posted in Technical on 03/12/2007 10:15 pm by scotty

Since Internet Explorer 7 is being delivered through the automatic windows update the adoption of IE7 it is inevitable.

However it’s important to ensure web applications can still run Ok in IE6 because it still owns significant market share. The actual percentage market share is difficult to determine, but the following statistics from the W3Schools site had 39.8% of visitors running IE6 in February 2007.

Given that it is mostly technical folk visiting W3Schools.com this percentage is probably on the low side, given that technical users are more likely using IE7 or alternative browsers such as Firefox. The statistics for January and February 2007 below.

Given that IE6 is still out there it’s important to still test your web application for this browser. The simplest way to do is run IE6 standalone – nothing to install just run the executable!

I have read of solutions where you can install IE6 and IE7 together but then there were comments about install issues. Or, you can run a Virtual PC image that has IE6 installed – which is a fair amount of effort and Virtual PC is resource hungry. The simplest solution I’ve found so far is here, and you can download the IE6 standalone version from here.

February 2007
IE7 -16.4%
IE6 – 39.8%
IE5 – 2.5%
Firefox – 31.2%
Mozilla – 1.4%
Safari – 1.7%
Opera -1.5%

January 2007
IE7 – 13.3%
IE6 – 42.3%
IE5 – 3.0%
Firefox – 31.0%
Mozilla – 1.5%
Safari – 1.7%
Opera – 1.5%

Source – http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp