Download Internet Explorer 6 in Windows 7

Question

I know Internet Explorer 6 was built for XP but is their a copy that I can download on my Windows 7 machine for debugging purposes? Internet Explorer 9 has an excellent developer console but the browsing modes only include 7-9. It would be great if there was an Internet Explorer 9 build with 6 as a browsing option but there isn't as far as I can tell. Someone suggested I run Windows XP in VirtualBox, but I'd rather just install it in Windows 7 if possible.

Answer 1

The recommended way to test using IE 6 on a Windows 7 PC is to run a Windows XP virtual machine with IE 6. You can download this (Windows_XP_IE6.exe) for free from Microsoft at: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575

Answer 2

Installing IE 6 cannot be done in Windows 7 Directly and if there were some hack to do so, I wouldn't recommend relying on it to present appropriately.

While you can use Virtual Box, VMWare, or some other virtualization product, the best option from a cost perspective is almost certainly to use XP Mode which is a pre-built XP Virtual Machine provided by Microsoft. XP Mode requires you have Windows 7 Pro, Enterprise, or Ultimate. If you don't have Windows 7 Pro, upgrading to Pro is the cheapest way of doing this - using the Windows Anytime Upgrade, it costs about $90 to go to Pro. Otherwise, you'd have to purchase a full retail copy of Windows 7 (or find an old full retail copy of XP) if you don't have one lying around. Such a copy would likely cost you close to $300.