Update: As mentioned in the comments below, following these instructions screws up IE6, it makes IE6 redirect all page load requests to the defaut browser (in my case, FireFox).  I’m very sorry to those who ran this.Also there are a number of things that don’t work, like tabs and toolbars.

TredoSoft has an application which, for me at least, works great.  Download their Internet Explorer 7 standalone Installer and ir will download the IE7 installer for you and set it up as a standalone application.  There are still a couple of things that don’t work, but they’re less important if you just want this to test how pages look.  They also have a regex script to undo everything if this installer happens to screw up IE6 for you.

Just to repeat - do not follow the instructions on the rest of this post, they don’t work. I’m leaving it here only as an example of what doesn’t work.

Now that IE7 has been released, the main thing every single web developer is going to want to do is run it as a standalone app so that they can test sites in IE7 & IE6.  If you just install IE7 it will remove IE6.

There have been a couple of ways to do this with the beta releases, but I haven’t found any that work exactly the same, but I have made it work.  This solution on Tech-Recipes almost works, but when you run iexplore.exe it gives a popup error “cannot find normaliz.dll”.  For some reason it feels the need to tell me this three times.  However, this is an easy fix.  I just grabbed the dll from DLL-files.com & dropped it into the same folder that iexplore.exe is in & bingo it works.  Kinda.

The first thing I noticed is that http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx, the default first load screen doesn’t load right.  There’s a JavaScript error icon down the bottom of the window, but double-clicking on it doesn’t open the error dialog box. Odd.  This may be a problem with the page, as loading the page up in Firefox gives a JavaScript error too: “Load not defined”.  The fact that the menu is hidden by default (clicking ALT shows it) will, I think, throw a few people.  But it means that there is a huge amount of display area by default.

From there there’s just a couple of other things which may well be due to this not having been installed:

  • The favorites menu doesn’t load at all
  • I can’t open a new tab, the menu option is grayed out, even though the option is turned on in IE7 Internet Options.
  • All dropdowns get blocked by the popup blocker, which I can’t turn off or filter by url.
  • There’s no ‘Home’ button?
  • I thought it was supposed to render RSS feeds nicely, but is seems to just still be dumping the XML to screen: http://blogs.drive.com.au/index.xml
  • The default (and only) search provider is Google.  This isn’t a bug per-se, but I thought they were deafulting to the Live search engine.

Still, I’m glad I could get the thing to load at all.  If & when the suggested auto-update occurs, I may install it properly, as I guess if not most then a large portion of internet users will then be using it.