At the end of November, Microsoft made available for download a free VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit, addressing
developers looking to test Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7, side by side, on a single machine.
The news that Microsoft will enable developers to test multiple IEs on a single computer broke back in February 2006.
The Internet Explorer 6 Application Compatibility VPC Image was released on November 30, 2006, and delivered support for VPC 2004 and VPC 2007 and it enjoyed quite a success.
"Beyond what I would have expected. And with few exceptions, the feedback has been positive. Without a doubt, we're going to be continuing this process. The images will stay relatively the same, we'll just push out the time bombing date each time. To date, we've had almost 60,000 downloads!" revealed a Microsoft representative.
The image will not be validated by the Windows Genuine Advantage tool. Consequently, no additional Microsoft software that requires validation will be installed on the image. This because Microsoft deactivated the product key used with the image.
"The other one that people have been asking about is IE5 or IE5.5. After we got the IE6 image out, I started investigating IE5 and IE5.5. I was a little surprised at the low share of IE5.x! It has been dropping much more quickly than I ever would have expected, and today, it's less than 1%. At less than 1%, I can't really justify shipping a VPC image that would affect a small subset of people," concluded the Microsoft representative.
The Internet Explorer 6 Application Compatibility VPC Image is available for download
here.
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