That’s right, Internet Explorer 10.
Yes they did just release 9, but they are already working on version 10! So right now you can download the ‘test drive’ version of Internet Explorer 10 right here. And if you are on Windows I’d recommend it for the ability of the test drive to quickly change rendering engines.
Holding down the alt key, and pressing 5,7,8,9,0 will let you choose IE 5-10. But notice how IE 6.0 is left out? I wonder if this has anything to do with it?
At any rate, I loaded up a Windows NT 4.0 VM with IE 5.5, and precoded to install IE 6.0 out of solidarity.
Thankfully they haven’t pulled the plug on new IE 6 installs. Yet.
So rest assured you can load up IE6, and hit MSN for your daily Paris Hilton fix. Which initially I was about to joke about and.. well. There you go. Like some things, neither one of them will go away.
So what is useful about being able to quickly shift rendering engines? Well if you still have any Virtual Server 2005 installs, is that you have to admin them from Internet Explorer, and IE 8 and beyond have broken the admin interface like this:
Which makes it impossible to select anything from a drop down list, like ISO’s, networks disks etc..
But now with this version of IE10 you can quickly known it down to IE 7, or 5 and get…
The interface the way it was meant. And it’s far easier to navigate with alt keys a native app, then something in a VM.
Right now, it’s a good thing that Microsoft hasn’t pulled the plug on new Internet Explorer 6 installs at this time, but it will most likely happen when Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 go out of support.
For anyone who has Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows Millennium and Windows 2000, the full download of Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 can be found here: http://www.oldapps.com/internet_explorer.php?old_internet_explorer=11
Internet Explorer 6 is included with Windows XP RTM, Windows XP Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2003 RTM and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Service Pack 1.
By the way, are there two Paris Hiltons in the MSN screenshot via IE6 on Windows NT 4.0? If not, do you know who is the other girl next to Paris Hilton? 😀
Well it finally happened, you can’t directly download IE6 anymore. But thanks to mrpijey, of BetaArchive, you can quickly and easily wget the entire tree, with all the languages that IE6 ever supported.
For now.
So mirror while you can!