Another update to the IE6 and IE7 Virtual PC images that the IE Team at Microsoft makes available is available for download in the Microsoft Download Center. The previous ones expired on 2007-12-07; these expire on 2008-04-01.

Internet Explorer and Firefox are in a constant race for both the lion’s share of the browser market and for the top dog position when it comes down to which of the two products is more locked down from a security perspective. In terms of audience Internet Explorer has little contest from Firefox, although the open source browser has increased substantially its foothold on the market growing its share to approximately 15% at the end of October 2007, according to data from Net Applications. In contrast, IE accounts for the largest install base with 78%.

Security is a different matter altogether and a tad more difficult to measure up. The fact of
the matter is that the end goal of delivering top user protection is a combination of code quality and lack of vulnerabilities in the default design, along with an absent threat environment. (more…)

audience internet, browser market, code security, DNS, dns configuration, Firefox, ie, Internet, internet explorer, mac os x, mac versions, trojan, video fragment, Web, Windows,

Previously, I had written about IE6 and IE7 Virtual PC images that the IE Team at Microsoft makes available. As the previous release of the VPCs has expired, a refresh release has been issued. The new release expires on 2007-12-07.

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If you need to run IE 6 and IE 7 on the same system for some reason (testing?), what are you supposed to do?

One solution is the “Multiple IE installer” from TredoSoft. I haven’t tried it, but it is certainly a novel approach. Looks like you can run IE3, IE4.01, IE5, IE5.5, and IE6 with it.

TredoSoft also provides instructions and a utility that allows you to run IE7 side-by-side with IE6. Again, I haven’t tried it, but it is good to know that it is available.

When I need to test different versions of the browser, I have as of late been relying on VPC images of Windows XP with IE6 and IE7 that have been provided by the IE team. The VPC images run with the free Virtual PC 2007. They expire on 2007-08-17, for various reasons, but the IE team has in the past provided a “refresh” for the IE6 VPC image when it last expired, and the expectation is that this will continue. The expiration-refresh cycle allows for control over how “old” an image is allowed to get - refreshes have the latest security patches installed so people aren’t left

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