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Well I’ve just upgraded to IE7 on my new development laptop and it’s very refreshingly different. Microsoft apparently took one and a half years to develope it and it shows in it’s maturity as a browser.The down side is that there is still a shovel load full of web users that still have IE6 and IE5, so what to do if you make a website and want to see if it works in the major browsers, not just the browser that you happen to have installed on your development system.

You can run side by side installations of Firefox and Opera, but IE has always dragged the chain on this, due to IE being so heavily integrated into the operating system.

When I upgraded to IE7 I definately at least wanted to be able to have IE6 on the same machine. Well the dodgey hacks and workarounds that you will find if you do a web search on the topic, just didn’t work for me. Mostly they didn’t address that once you upgrade to IE7 the underlying DLLs that drive the browser are not backward compatible. So a cutdown version of IE6 just isn’t good enough for a true result.

Microsoft have finally acknowledged this and now have released a special IE6 virtual machine image to handle just this. Seems like massive overkill, but it works so I can’t complain.

Check out the Microsoft MSDN blog about IE6 and IE7 running together, and go and sort out your IE6 and IE7 on the same machine problem once and for all.

Of course the other alternative is if you have multiple PCs lying around you can have a separate machine setup with each IE. Which I have also done.

Aaron

I’d like to quickly mention that I personally use Wordpress and b2evolution for my blogging needs.

In fact I’ll be moving away from b2evolution on my other sites and into Wordpress, since I find the SPAM filters in Wordpress to be far superior. Blog SPAM is as much of an issue as it is for normal email. So any software that handles it better will put you ahead from the start.

Customising Wordpress is straightforward and simple, and the admin area is very easy to use. I can see why after installing and customising a couple of Wordpress blogs it has grown so fast among the blogging community.

We have several blogs in our installable scripts area that you can install and try out.

b2
b2evolution
myBloggie
bMachine
Nucleus
pLog
pMachine
Serendipity
WordPress

Aaron

I have just noticed not 1/2 hour ago, that for the last 5 months or so months (I don’t really know how long) our main logo was displaying badly in Internet Explorer.

PNG format with alpha transparency in IE5.5 and up, was rendering with a light blue background. I can’t believe it.

I was positive that I checked IE before going live but it was so long ago that I’ve now forgotten. And no one mentioned it to me.

Talk about egg-on-face.

You always say it can’t happen to you until it does.

There are several fixes for this out there here’s one of them.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/

Oh by the way, I didn’t bother with any fixes, I just changed from PNG to GIF because I could with a standard white background on our pages.

Aaron