Run IE6 On Vista

Internet Explorer is the biggest torn in my butt since the dawn of age when there was a lonely torn from a lonely plant – which was the only plant available to poke my butt. The one thing i hate as a webdesigner is that you have to cater your site for a number of browsers. More often than not you have to cater it for Internet Explorer because that is the default web browser on all computers. Mister G did ask me why can’t i just cater for Firefox the one that doesn’t give problems. While I would love to do that but it’s not possible and here is why.

1. You have people who have no brains when it comes to using the internet,
2. you have people who have no idea what is Firefox,
3. you have people who are too lazy to install Firefox,
4. You have people who are too lazy to want to KNOW about Firefox
5. You have people who will just use whatever is default on a computer – which is usually windows – hence it will be IE.
6. Vista is still new, and even though IE7 is out, people do not know how to upgrade because of reason 1 and 4.

So it is tough to cater for just Firefox which is my most beloved web browser at the moment. Worse still is that despite IE7 fixing a number of bugs that IE6 had.. not everyone uses IE6 yet. What can one do? I went all over the place to search for a program to help me run IE on my Vista. Vista as you know doesn’t allow IE6 since it already comes with an IE7. But that doesn’t mean i can’t find ways to go round it. After much googling and trials, I came across one very helpful article that teaches you “How to run IE6 on Windows Vista using Virtual PC.” You can view the full article there, in the mean time I’ll shorten it for you on how to go about installing IE6 on your Vista Platform. Quite straightforward actually. Requirements:

• Download the free Virtual PC 2007 by Microsoft here
• Download Internet Explorer VPD image. Those are the main two things you need.

Here is what it should look like on your Vista screen. Click on the images to get a clearer view.

That’s the Mircrosoft Virtual PC at work on your Vista. Pretty neat.

And that is the Internet Explorer 6 on Vista. Ta Dahhhhh!! No more pain.