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Update: All IE Browsers Standalone On Same PC (September 28, 2006) solves the problem.

In the comments of “Multiple versions of IE in one Windows PC” I could see that other people also had problems with the suggestion to make IE6 standalone.

Jon Galloway has the solution: Run IE7 as standalone and keep IE6 as the default browser. I have tried it out for a couple of days and could not get it to work until he posted a followup, IE7 Standalone Launch Script:

How to use the IE7 Launch Script:

1. If you already have IE7 set up for standalone mode, skip to step 4.
2. Download the IE7 Beta Install from MSDN. [...]
3. Open the install file with a decompression program like WinRAR (yep, it’s an EXE, but it’s a self extracting EXE) and extract them to a folder. [...]
4. Copy the text below to notepad and save it as IE7.bat in the same folder you’re setting up the standalone IE7 copy.
5. When you want to run IE7, double click IE7.bat – it pops up a DOS window that will hang around as long as IE7 is running so it can clean up after it (by deleting that pesky registry key) when you close IE7. Don’t close the DOS window down or your pancreas will implode.
6. When you’re done with IE7, just shut it down. The DOS window will clean up that pesky registry key and delete the standalone files, then disappear. If you shut IE7 down and the DOS window hangs around, just close it and run it again.

Here is the script that should be saved as IE7.bat:

@ECHO OFF
TITLE IE7 Launcher 1.3

ECHO IE7 STANDALONE LAUNCHER 1.3
ECHO Updated for IE7 Beta 2 Preview - 2/2/2006
ECHO.
ECHO Do not close this window or it will not clean up after itself properly.
ECHO You can pass a URL into this batch file, like this:
ECHO ie7.bat www.microsoft.com
ECHO More info here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/12/16/504864.aspx
ECHO.
ECHO When you close IE7, this will remove the registry key and shut itself down.
ECHO.
ECHO Setting up IE7 for standalone mode…
PUSHD %~dp0

ECHO Removing IE7 registry key.
> %TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO REGEDIT4
>>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO.
>>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{C90250F3-4D7D-4991-9B69-A5C5BC1C2AE6}]
>>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{000214E5-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}]
>>%TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg ECHO.
:: Merge the REG file to delete the IE7 standalone entry
REGEDIT /S %TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg

REN SHLWAPI.DLL SHLWAPI.DLL.BAK
TYPE NUL > IEXPLORE.exe.local
ECHO Running IE7…
iexplore.exe “%1″

:: Merge the REG file to delete the IE7 standalone entry
REGEDIT /S %TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg
:: Delete the temporary REG file
DEL %TEMP%.\IE7Fix.reg

ECHO Removing IE7 standalone files…
REN SHLWAPI.DLL.BAK SHLWAPI.DLL
DEL IEXPLORE.exe.local
POPD
ECHO Complete, closing…

One problem with this: If I start IE6 before IE7, I cannot use the address bar in IE6 (as this loads the page in Firefox which is my default browser). The workaround for me is to start IE7, and then start IE6. Now I can see a web page in IE7 and IE6 side-by side.

I’m really glad Jon updated the script. The previous script worked with IE7 beta 1, but with beta 2 it could only run once once, then it would not work for me. Eli on Jon Galloway’s comment page has exacly the same problem.

So, if you want to install IE7 and keep a working version of IE6, then I could only recommend the Jon Galloway method described above. He has an updated article: Runing IE7 Beta 2 Preview next to IE6 (the right way).

Technorati Tags: IE, IE3, IE4, IE5, IE5.5, IE6, IE7, multiple internet explorers, microsoft internet explorer, standalone, browser

This entry was posted by Jesper Rønn-Jensen on Friday, February 3rd, 2006 at 21:05 (GMT-1) and is filed under Browser. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.