RE: Microsoft browsers

Ignacio Javier [mailto:igjav@ctv.es] wrote:
>For long ago I had the idea (based on facts, I think) that you cannot
>compatibilize the presence of two different Internet Explorer browsers on
>Win32 (except perhaps Explorer 2 or - with 4 or +). The question is:

With IE3.0 and IE4.0, that was completely true - it was not possible to have
both installed at the same time on the same operating system install (you
can, of course, have a multiple-boot system with more than one copy of the
OS installed, with different versions of IE on each).

>anyone knows the existence of a patch or maybe a "kernelled" version
>(including activex and scripting support, at least) that makes a fact the
>posibility of compatibilizing the activeX compatible browsers in a same win
>primary partition?

Gail Donnelly [mailto:gail@nomadicweb.com] wrote:
>There is no playing with both IE's they are integrated into the OS and as
such
>cannot exist side-by-side.  You might find what you are looking for in the
>community at the above address, and just hang on to that old 486 or P1.

That's not completely true - with IE5, Microsoft released a mechanism called
"Compatibility Mode" that allows you to run an IE4 browser side-by-side with
an IE5 browser - more information can be found on MSDN Online at
[http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q197/3/11.ASP?LNG=ENG&SA=M
SDN].

This is not quite truly side-by-side, because although Compatibility Mode
does use the IE4 MSHTML.DLL (the rendering/layout/HTML engine), it does uses
the IE5 DLLs for much of the rest of the system, so using this to debug HTTP
transport problems (e.g.) is not a good idea.  It's particularly difficult
to make true side-by-side happen, because (as has been mentioned, I believe
;^) IE is in fact pretty integrated into the operating system.  The
difficulty of getting all the DLLs to work side-by-side would be equivalent
to, say, allowing multiple versions of comctl32.dll or comdlg32.dll to work
side-by-side.


Walter Ian Kaye [mailto:walter@natural-innovations.com] wrote:
>Try changing the names of the executables. For Excel, you could have, 
>say excel4.exe and excel5.exe, and then could run both at once. They 
>used separate .INI files, though.

Definitely do NOT do this.  It won't work as you expect, as the actual
IEXPLORE.EXE doesn't actually do a whole lot - it just fires up and
delegates to a host of system DLLs (that reside in Windows\System) that are
updated by IE, like shdocvw.dll and mshtml.dll.  It MIGHT fire up an IE
window, but it will still be running IE5, not IE4.

-Chris Wilson
 Internet Explorer Team

Received on Monday, 3 January 2000 13:33:53 UTC