Zeo

Ok so I lied. IE7 are much more better at least comparing to IE6, well in term of tabbed browsing, supporting transparent PNG and “real CSS”. I had the craziest idea this morning about installing and test IE7 (currently Beta 2 Preview Release) on my Windows XP SP2.

There a few questions came up after I’d finish downloading the IE7 installer. Most of it relates to IE6.

1. Can I use IE7 side by side with IE6? (Standalone mode)
2. Do I have to totally removed IE6 from my computer?
3. If I attempt to do a full install and the installation somehow fails, how do I roll back my IE7 installation to IE6?

So after technorating myself, most of the question above is answered. Yes, you can install IE7 in standalone mode without having to uninstall or remove IE6. I won’t risk my IE6 for just having to test IE7 out. Moreover, most of my web works still need IE6.

Let me remind you that if you attempt to follow anything that I wrote here, I will not take any responsibility if anything happen to your computer.

I successfully followed the step by step guide to IE7 standalone mode from JonGalloway.ToString().
There is no problem when you run the batch file for the first time. On the second time I bump into a problem, where the IE7 launches for a few second and then suddenly closes. At first I thought that I corrupted my system since IE itself is actually a collection of Windows system components. Then I try to launch my other installed browser (IE6, Mozilla Firefox and Opera) to see whether it has any effect on my other browser. And it turns out that no problems occur. I read a few comments on Jon Galloway’s blog, technorati blog search and it seems that few others also have the same problem.

Like usual, I intend to find out why it’s stop working for the second time and check the IE7.bat batch file script. Since the batch file have few lines refering to registry editing, so I fire up the Windows Registry Editor (start->run->regedit). The first thing I do is to check the deleted data (refer to the batch script):

{C90250F3-4D7D-4991-9B69-A5C5BC1C2AE6}

Using the F3 shortcut key for “Find Next”, it seems that there are still the exact same data exist in the registry. Before I made any attempt to play with Registry Editor, I made a backup to my current registry setting in case anything bad happen.

This is how I solve my IE7.bat startup problem

Regardless that I have no experience on editing batch file that relates to windows registry

1. Open Registry Editor (start->run->regedit).
2. Click on “My Computer”.
3. Make necessary registry backup (File->Export).
4. Click to highlight “My Computer” again to make sure.
5. Go to Edit->Find. Find the registry data
   {C90250F3-4D7D-4991-9B69-A5C5BC1C2AE6}
6. Click on the name that the data belongs to and delete it.
7. Then go to your IE7 folder and launch the IE7.bat batch file.
   Your IE7 will normally start.

So each time I wanted to use IE7, this is how I currently do it. Please leave a comment if anyone has any better idea rather than using the step above i.e. editing the IE7.bat.

I also took few screenshot on how my blog rendered in IE7 and uploaded it to my photo flickr. My first impression browsing my blog using IE7 is Why does it look like the screenshot I took using SafariRSS… and not forgetting the navigation bar reminds me of Flock browser.

UPDATE: It seems that Jon Galloway updated the IE7 Launcher (version 1.3) batch script which now works perfectly on IE7 Beta 2 preview without using the above workaround.