I’d been meaning to post about this for a while but I never got around to it.
One random, lonely, boring day (really every day) I started digging through some files and happened upon something like this in IE’s Program Files folder:
“No,” I thought, “surely not.” Surely so, it turns out. That’s not just an old IE icon, that’s the old Internet Explorer. No I don’t know how I ended up with duplicates.
I check the “About” box and get this:
Hmm..”Side-by-Side Mode” you say? You kid, you kid.
Oh you were serious weren’t you?
I thought it was pretty cool that there’s still a workaround method. I guarantee this is stupid old news, but hey I found it myself 
I’d imagine this would only work if you had IE6 installed and then upgraded to 7. I’m not sure how IE8 handles it yet because I’ve not installed it for XP (I got the shared computer bluuuuuues yeah)
Heck I didn’t know they even produced IE8 for XP until a little while ago.
What point does “Side-By-Side” mode serve exactly?
Nice post.
Well, when I start IE from the icons in the pic, a dialog pops up saying it’s “Internet Explorer Compatibility Mode”. Yes that is rather unrelated.
It’s probably good for web developers, if nothing else.
It’s hard for web developers to maintain support for IE6 because it was like teh suck at everything ever and needed special workarounds and hacks for a lot of web coding.
But they still need to maintain that support because surprisingly a lot of people still use IE6 — if I’m not wrong it was the last IE upgrade for Windows 2000.
And since web developers need to test new browsers as well as more common older ones, having the ability to have more than one IE version at the same time is probably pretty nice.
Usually, or at least I always thought, that once IE was upgraded two versions couldn’t be used at the same time, or even installed together on the same computer (at least from IE5 up). I’d imagine this made it pretty hard to develop for a browser you didn’t have access to anymore.
Also, having IE6 in general is probably a nice fallback if some site decides to up and choke on you on a newer IE version. I’d say “use another browser” but sites that choke based on browser version also…tend to require IE. Natch.
But like I said this is probably age-old news now; frankly I didn’t want to check and then lose the motivation to post
I just thought it was cool.
Thanks
I can see how that would help now.
Sorry for being so long-winded about it.