Testing Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3

After working the bugs out of a new XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant version of my company's hompage using XHTML and CSS, I decided I should probably test it in the new version of Explorer 7, which will soon be the defacto standard for web browsers. Well, not only does it break layouts which previously worked with IE6, but the IE7 installer also takes the liberty of completely disabling and/or overwriting your existing IE6 installation. After a bit of hair-pulling and uninstalling IE7 to revert back to IE6, I did a search and found a great little package to let you run a standalone version of IE7 without removing IE6. Perhaps it will be of use to you too. It consists of a set of batch files that will extract the IE7 files from the latest installer and then makes some registry changes to let you run the browser in standalone mode. It also installs a "hotfix" that is required for tabbed browsing, but the hotfix does not affect IE6 functionality in any way. Someone else created another IE7 standalone installer that will do all this transparently, but I like the batch file method a bit better because it's fast, easily reversible and you can look at the files to see what it's doing.