Wednesday, April 25, 2007 9:16 AM
Update on July 12, 2007
There is a cool utility released by the IE Team called "User Agent String Utility" which is a small executable that opens an instance of IE 7 which is configured to report its identity as IE 6. This helps with websites which do a comparison of the IE Version and tend to recognize IE 7 as an outdated / unidentified version and hence dont function / render well.
Once you install this utility, you can open up "User Agent String Utility" from Program Files and it would prompt you with the necessary instructions. This opens an instance of the IE7 but reports its identity to the websites that seek the same as an older version.
This would be a great utility for one of those sites which are designed the hard way and depend on the IE version detected.
The tool can be downloaded for free from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9517db9c-3c0d-47fe-bd04-fad82a9aac9f&displaylang=en
For all those folks who have migrated to Windows Vista and / or Internet Explorer 7, I am sure you would have liked the various features Internet Explorer 7 provides in terms of ease of navigation, security and other nifty things.
However, if you would like to check your application on Internet Explorer 6 for the benefit of folks who wouldnt have migrated yet to IE 7, you can still do that by using the IE 6 VPC.
Internet Explorer 6 does not run on Windows Vista and the default browser for Windows Vista is IE 7.
Hence, to check for application compatibility in IE 6, you can download the IE 6 VPC Image from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en#filelist Its available for download for free.
Its a pretty big download and you may want to start the download and leave it during lunch / end-of-day for getting downloaded.
If you havent used Virtual PC, you may want to download it as well, from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=04D26402-3199-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=enfor free
Having said, I would recommend all users, including Windows XP SP2 users to upgrade to IE 7 for all obvious reasons, you can check from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/features.mspx
You can download IE 7 for Windows XP SP2 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9ae91ebe-3385-447c-8a30-081805b2f90b&DisplayLang=en for free.
Cheers and happy exploring (the internet 
) !!!