Lazycoder

What happens when you tie your components together too closely

ComputerZen.com – Scott Hanselman – Running Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 2 without installing it.:

UPDATE#2: From the IEBlog “As Chris Wilson pointed out, “‘IE’ is actually a collection of system components – networking, browser hosting, core HTML rendering, printing, etc. When we install a new version of IE, we’re installing it for all applications that use these system components – including the tiny iexplore.exe itself.” Because of this, we do not support the various hacks that allow side by side running of IE6 and the IE7 Beta 2 Preview. Running with these could cause issues with the stability of a system.

So, seriously, now I’m sorry I even mentioned it. Your Mileage May Vary.

Seeing Scott make this post was pretty ironic in my local scope. Just today, I updated my Safari WebKit tree to take advantage of the web page inspector, built it, and ran another instance of Safari using the latest, bleeding-edge version of the WebKit side-by-by with the current release version of Safari. I’m kind of saddened that you aren’t able to run IE7 side-by-side with IE6. I mean, Microsoft has a LOT of talented engineers and they’ve had plenty of time to re-architect IE. It’s pretty stupid that they can’t segregate the components. But I understand how it goes when you are working with legacy code.