I’ve found a site that provided me with a download of IE6: evolt.org has archives of lots of IE downloads. I downloaded the ugly beast (76MB!) and found I could do nothing with it. First I tried unchecking IE in installed programs -> windows components. But that removed only visible shortcuts and doesn’t actually uninstall IE. Then, after the download, I tried to install IE6. It said I had a newer version and it refused to install. Also, when IE was unchecked in my installed windows components, I got the same message.

Right before I was going to search on how to get multiple instances of IE running, I googled for “uninstall IE7″. That’s where I found the simple solution to check “updated” in the installed programs list. When you do that, it shows IE7beta and you can uninstall it. Sweet, though these are the things that make you feel stupid for not having found it yourself. ;-)

Some people might wonder why I didn’t just tried to dual install IE6 and IE7, so that I might check sites out in both of them. The reason is that I make a great deal of being able to sleep and not worry about yet another browser that fucks up CSS. I’ve heard too many things about how IE7beta still messes up, so I wont test sites in it before a more final version appears. Vista is reported to be released somewhere between september-december so I still have some months of baby-sleep before a release candidate hits the road.

For those of you that are going to install IE7 for some reason, be warned that it will override your current IE6 installation.

I knew it and still went ahead with it. Now I need IE6 and it’s gone. And I need it because I’m developing another site. I need to check this site out. I need to see how IE6 screws up and what I need to do to adjust it.

Luckily I remember having read somewhere there is a standalone version of IE6 available. Not so lucky I wasn’t able to find it on my first try, but I’ll give it another try tomorrow.

ps: For those of you interested, there’s an interesting thread at WebmasterWorld about what’s fixed and what’s not fixed in regards to CSS in IE7. Take a look at it here. The first thing that struck me about IE7 was that fonts are rendered a lot better than in Firefox. No, actually that was the second thing that struck me. The first being how ugly I found its design.

For those who don’t know this already: a public beta of Internet Explorer 7 is available for download.

There’s also a developer toolbar available for Internet Explorer (works on 6 and 7). Microsoft gives the following overview of it:

– Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
– Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
– Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
– View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
– Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
– Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS Web feed links.
– Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
– Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
– Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
– Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
– Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages.