Internet Explorer can be downgraded!

What do you do when you need to test your pages on three versions of shitty browsers that cannot coexist in a single OS installation? Ideally, I’d have three OS instances that I can RDP/VNC into. However, lacking that luxury, the second best answer is to have three VM instances.

I found out the hard way that a time-bombed VPC image from Microsoft isn’t the answer, since the converted image wouldn’t even get activated in VMWare Fusion. What a waste of time that was.

Thankfully, a helpful colleague pointed out that I can actually downgrade IE. Well, I didn’t know that!

So I simply made a copy of an existing IE7 VM image, ran %windir%\ie7\spuninst\spuninst.exe, waited for Windows to uninstall a bunch of stuff (notably SP3) and hey, back to IE6. Looks like you can downgrade IE8 to IE7 the same way too (just replace ie7 with ie8 in the path), but I haven’t tried that myself.

Ah, the infinite joy of testing shitty browsers!