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April 28, 2006

Test Internet Explorer 7 Without Installing It

To run Internet Explorer 7, you need Windows XP SP2.

Step 1

Download Internet Explorer 7 (14.8 MB). You could also download IE7 from File Hippo.

Step 2

Download the IE7 Standalone archive created by Jon Galloway.

Step 3

Create a new folder IE7 in Program Files, copy the IE7 setup file and extract the files from the archive downloaded at Step 2.

Step 4

Run the file IE7 Standalone Setup.bat and click OK to install xmllitesetup.exe, an update necessary so that IE7 has tabs.

Step 5

Create a shortcut on the desktop to the file IE7.bat. Change the icon of the shortcut to one from IE7's iexplore.exe.


Now you have a standalone Internet Explorer 7 that runs along with Internet Explorer 6. You can launch IE7 from the shortcut you've created on the desktop. Note that not all the features will work well and this standalone installation is recommended only for developers that want to test IE7, but also need Internet Explorer 6.

More about this setup from Jon Galloway.

Related:
Internet Explorer 7 Review

65 comments:

  1. Great tip! Thanks... This really helped a lot.

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  2. I just tried this and it kind of worked. It loaded IE 7 but not all of it. Certain features just didnt work right. (for example the tabs do not display)

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  3. Thats normal, even with IE beta 2 installed. :/

    But.. It is MS-software, so not strange at all!

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  4. It's a hack. Why would you expect it to work properly? It's not Microsoft's fault that someone hacked their browser and consequently it didn't work right.

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  5. I wasnt saying that it was Microsoft's fault. I was mearly saying that the hack didnt work properly on my system.

    I can use IE 7 with the hack, as long as I dont care about not having tabbed browsing. But at that point, its called ie6.

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  6. no tabs, and zonealarm(free) hates it when touching any of the buttons, complains about entry point missing. otherwise the hack works well.

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  7. i had problems logging into a site that uses .htaccess for authentication.

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  8. It's great! Even has a sense of drama

    "Couldn't add 'Talkfreelance' to favorites. Catastrophic Failure".

    I've never had a catastrophic failure before :)

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  9. Aaron -- no, it's not just IE6 without tabbed browsing. if you followed web standards compliance issues, you would know that IE7 is quite a different beast from IE6 underneath the hood. the IE7 team is taking huge steps towards standards compliance, even working with the mozilla foundation on some points (unified RSS icons, for example). for more information, i suggest you keep an eye on the IEBlog. you can find it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/default.aspx

    syndicated via RSS here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/rss.aspx

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  10. Great tip !!!
    I have tried it and it works fine on my win XP virtual machine instance. It's a great way to test IE7 without installing it; now I can see that many features look quite similar to Firefox ones ...
    Greetings from Italy and thanks again !!!

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  11. A great way to test internet explorer, thanks so much for this tip.

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  12. Finally, I can have Internet Explorer running on standalone. All these years, IE was integrated into the Windows Operating System, thus making it a very difficult application to maintain, whenever IE encounters some problem.

    Right now, I already have IE 7 Beta 2 installed permanently in my machine, so I am not sure if I am going to try this out, just in case of endangering my machine once again.

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  13. How to create the bat file?

    Open the folder where you've extracted the files from the exe, create a new file, right-click and select Edit, copy the text with the small font size from the blog post, paste it in Notepad then save it.

    If you want to have other standalone versions of Internet Explorer (for example, you have IE7 installed and want to use IE6), go to this site.

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  14. I updated the post to run the code in the bat file without seeing the console window.

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  15. Hi, I am getting an error msg, something like: Entry point not found for SHRegGetValueA procedure in SHLWAPI.dll. Help! Anyway the idea is great, thanks.

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  16. very helpful tip - just posted this url on Microsoft's forum

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  17. What Microsoft forum? I'm afraid they don't support this hack for IE7.

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  18. I have get a error message.
    SHLWAPI.dll not found

    What shall I do now?

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  19. This error message appears, "The procedure entry point InternetGetSecurityInfoByURLW could not be located in the dynamic link library WININET.dll.

    What can I do?!!

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  20. I didn't check but can this post help in providing tabs to this hack?

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  21. to get the tabs to work you have to go to youre folder internet explorer 7/update/ and run xmllitesetup.exe

    this will install the tabs this work with the hack for me

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  22. Internet Explorer's Pop-up Blocker helps to block some unwanted pop-up windows from appearing without blocking the pop-up windows you deliberately launch. Pop-up Blocker is turned on by default.

    To turn off Pop-up Blocker:

    1.

    From the Internet Explorer Tools menu, click Pop-up Blocker

    2.

    Select Turn Off Pop-up Blocker.

    You can customize Pop-up Blocker in several ways, including allowing the Web sites you select to launch pop-ups. To access the Pop-up Blocker settings:

    1.

    From the Internet Explorer Tools menu, click Pop-up Blocker

    2.

    Select Pop-up Blocker Settings

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  23. I installed IE7 Beta 2 following the instructions here and it installed well and I can run IE7...

    ... however, now when I run IE6, enter a website in the address box, it loads the Web Page into Firefox v1.5.

    What's up with that ???
    Any ideas ???

    Rgds,
    dragonfly...

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  24. I also had that problem with IE6 after running the hack...

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  25. Yep.. Me too. So how do you go back? It worked fine on one of my pc's, but on this one it opens another browser window when you try to go to a URL. Seems to have stuffed my machine up quite well actually!

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  26. "... however, now when I run IE6, enter a website in the address box, it loads the Web Page into Firefox v1.5."

    This is a known issue. To those of you having troubles with this, you can find a solution here on the official IEBlog.

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  27. "This is a known issue. To those of you having troubles with this, you can find a solution here on the official IEBlog."

    Sorry 'parasight', but I could not find a solution on the page you referred to. Can you be a little more specific?

    This problem is very frustrating and any help you or anyone else can offer is much appreciated.

    Regards,
    dragonfly...

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  28. Great job, thanks.
    By the way, they copied the functionality of Mozilla Firefox .....

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  29. WARNING!
    This MS7 Beta is very buggy.
    Even after un-install
    this IE7 Beta RUINED my default IE 6 installation. Since then I gave up trying to fix it.
    However (and because of this problem)
    I discovered Firefox which blows the doors off MS IE 7. So forget about MS7 and download Firefox.
    You can thank me later.
    PEACE

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  30. This error message appears, "The procedure entry point InternetGetSecurityInfoByURLW could not be located in the dynamic link library WININET.dll.

    this message is coming in one window and title of that window is "McAfee AutoUpdate:UpdaterUI.exe - Entry Point Not Found"

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  31. Hi,

    I'm having problems since downgrading back to IE 6, IE is now identifying itself as IE7 to websites yet rendering as IE 6.

    I'd stay away from installing this until this issue's fixed. I now have a dodgy IE 6 install.

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  32. Guys, the script is making a temporary change to your registry to IE7, and then reversing that change when you kill IE7.

    Points to keep in mind.

    1) Don't run IE6 and IE7 similtaneously.
    2) If you ran 'iexplore.exe' rather than the 'ie7.bat' the registry change didn't get undone. Run ie7.bat again and it should fix it.
    3) Ideally you should read http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/multiIE.html carefully to really understand what is going on here.

    Quick summary: The main issue is IE7 needs a 'Version Vector' key set to "IE"="7.0000" to work properly. If you open your registry (via regedit) to 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector' you can watch the batch script making the registry change as you run it. If it still says '7.000' even though IE7 isn't running, you'll have render issues.

    By default, IE6 installs set this key to 'IE'='6.0000'. However, IE5&6 don't actually need this key to work and in fact, if you want IE's conditional comments to work while you're testing locally, this key needs to be removed completely.

    Consequently, even if you manually delete it, every time you run this BAT script, it will re-create this key if is doesn't exist, and rewrite is as '6.000' when it closes -- disabling conditional comments in the process.

    I'm trying to figure a way to get the batch script to automatically delete the key when IE7 closes, but at the moment, I'm just using 'Registry Jumper' (google it) to jump me straight to that key each time where I manually delete it.

    The people that are having trouble with 'can't find SHLWAPI.DLL' are probably running the script in the wrong directly. 'SHLWAPI.DLL' **should** be in the IE7 directory, and this script attempts to temporarily hide it by renaming it (to 'SHLWAPI.DLL.BAK'), while IE7 is running. It then renames it to it's original name when IE7 closes.

    Hope that is of some help to people. Registry stuff is a black art.

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  33. I receive the following error when I click on the Tools dropdown Menu or the Page drop down menu.

    "The procedure entry point InternetGetSecurityInfoByURLW could not be located in the dynamic link library WININET.dll"

    The message box is titled "iclient.exe - Entry Point Not Found" ( I am running zone alarm on my machine )

    I checked the wininet.dll in Internet Explorer 7 folder and it is the latest version for IE7. There is one wininet.dll in the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ but that one is for IE6 if I am not mistaken.

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  34. when i try to load a url in ie6, ie7 automatically starts and loads the link.
    tried deleting the Version Vector reg entry but did no good. What else can i try?

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  35. when i try to load a url in ie6, ie7 automatically starts and loads the link.
    tried deleting the Version Vector reg entry but did no good. What else can i try?

    - i just rebooted. doesnt happen now, works fine =)

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  36. So I get caught...

    I didn't pay much attention when I had to change Beta 2 to 3 to get the install to run. And then I learn that Beta 3 was released this morning.

    I get an error message:

    The procedure entry point SHRegGetValueA could not be located in the dynamic link library SHLWAPI.dll

    Ah well I'll reboot and if that doesn't work Goodbye IE6 on this machine.

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  37. Alternatively, you can see how your site looks on IE7 simply by submitting your URL to IECapture at http://www.danvine.com/iecapture/

    And it will give you a screen shot.

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  38. Hi, just want to let you guys know that there is a launch script available for IE7 beta 3. You can read more about it here

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  39. I was having the following problem ...

    I am using windows Xp Corporate Edition with Sp2.
    I have recently formatted my system , did the necessary installations then
    I have upgraded IE 6 to IE 7 beta 3

    the problem i am facing is
    The main feature of Tabbed browsing is not working

    I checked the Tab Setting it was on still tabs were not visible as well as the favourites toolbar was not visible

    I turned off the Tab Settings the i could see the favourites toolbar


    I tried to work around a lot but didnt work

    I uninstalled ,rebooted the system then again installed but didnt work

    i am attaching 2 images of IE for

    1 ) With Tab Settings On
    2 ) With Tab Setting off

    for more clear understanding

    please help as i dont wish to format the system again for this silly thing

    --------------------

    thanks a lot my above problem was solved by Installing xmllitesetup.exe which was mentioned in the post

    I was under the impression that i did some mistake while update any ways
    Google Rocks...

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  40. Absolutely priceless! Thanks alot!

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  41. When I try this the shortcut to the .vbs file opens it in NOtepad not IE 7 browser. Why? HOw do I fix?

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  42. To run Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 just copy iertutil.dll and iexplorer.exe from Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 folder to Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 folder. Et voilĂ¡!

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  43. Does this work with release candidate 1?

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  44. Jon Galloway just released a new version of IE& stanbdalone launcher. CHeck it out
    http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2006/07/26/IE7-Standalone-_2800_Updated-for-IE7-Beta-3_2900_.aspx
    I personally use Firefox and I/ve managed to stay away from IE for a couple of years.
    But if you must use IE, I think Galloway's site is worth a visit. Good luck.

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  45. Great instructions. Worked the first try!

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  46. When clicking on sleect box, it sees it as a pop up, and then when you try and allow pop ups and even add the domain to safe list, it still prevents you from using the dropdown list.

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  47. I have a problem of opening a popup window in IE7. Sometimes, the popup window goes to the back of the parent window. Do you guys have this problem? If so, how to fix it?

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  48. I've also am having problems with opening new browser instances. If I right-click on a link and choose "Open in New Window", nothing happens. This is a very important since my app relies on opening new windows.

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  49. No way of running it on a W2000 machine?

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  50. i am not a computer geek who knows technical jargon so i don't have much of a chance of understanding just what the heck all this stuff is that is being thrown out in the tutorial. i thought i would try i.e.7 and see how it works and i could not get through all the intro tutorial that came with the program at that time. a windows update wiped out that part of the program over night and i just want to either get the tutorial back or dump this screwed up mess of a program called windows internet explorer 7. all i can find is a bunch of gobble de goop written in tech speak that is of absolutely no use at all. i think i can dump internet explorer completly and use google instead. if someone can't come up with the info i need i will give that a try. anybody out there that can help me ??

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  51. yeah..maybe I need try this one..thanks

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  52. Got UpdaterUI.exe - Entry Point Not Found...The procedure entry point GetProcessingImageFileNameW could not be located in the dynamic link library PSAPI.DLL, and all i was trying to do we click on Tools. Anyone can shed some light?

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  53. or you could just use mozilla. and you wouldn't need to worry all these errors.

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  54. Does anyone have a "select tag" problem?

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  55. See this link in Firefox & IE7

    http://24ways.org/examples/rounded-corners-the-css3-way/rounded3.html

    IE7 dissapoints big time! It still lacks css3 support.

    dotnetuncle (.NET Interview Questions).

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  56. Monster!
    It works great - thx a lot :-)

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  57. Tanks for this tip! It is very useful for webmasters.

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  58. Tanks for this tip! It is very useful for webmasters.

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  59. Some IE7 features work, some do not. But thanks for the tip.

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  60. well.... still DOESNT feel like the real ie7!

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  61. Sweet share, thanks!

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  62. In case if you have problems fixing your IE6 back to normal, you can visit this site and download their registry cleanup script:
    http://tredosoft.com/IE7_standalone

    It works for me! *phew*

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  63. Thank you.It saved my time while fixing cross browser issues.

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  64. thank you I am web developer and designer
    and I need too test my programs in both of this browsers
    and this is helpfully that as your kindness

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