Yes, Microsoft blows for having a browser tied into their OS. All of us know it, and we’ve known and loathed it for ages. Get over it and move on to an argument that might have some positive effect.

Thank you to those of you acknowledging the IE team’s effort in putting out a freely downloadable copy of Windows (just say that again to yourself…slowly) so that people who still have to support IE6 until it dies the horrible death it deserves can still test with it. The IE team has earned praise for their efforts. They just need to keep it up.

We have learned some interesting things about the distribution process in a virtual machine environment. One is that we currently don’t have a way for WGA to work inside this evaluation virtual machine because the process used to create a virtual machine involves de-activation of the key used in the VM. We are thinking about ways to fix this in the future but it’s not as easy to do with Windows XP as it wasn’t designed to support distribution like this.

@mdm-adph: Why would you want that? Virtual PC is freely available.

as sillyle pointed out above http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE is fantastic – however there’s no way that Microsoft can officially support this though – can you imagine what would happen if you started browsing dodgy sites using securityless IE5? your computer would get infested with everything!

Note you CAN’T use Multiple_IE on Vista

However I’m guessing that you can run Multiple_IE on a the VPC

I mean, we don’t have to do it to test sites on FF 1.5 and FF 2. All we need to do is install one of each and we can test in both (albeit not at the same time).

Kudos however to MS for releasing it at all (although I’d prefer they don’t restrict it to VPC).

http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=588