IE 5.5 to 5.0?

Is there a way to swith from IE 5.5 to 5.0? When I try to run the 5.0 setup file it says you already have a version newer than the one you are trying to install....or something to that affect. Anyone have and ideas?

I wonder how you can do that.

Just one question : Why you want to do that ?

JD

I know there was a way to do it in Win98 as I had to do it when some software installed a dodgy IE5 without asking (in the days of IE4). It involved going into the registry and editing HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE under software/microsoft/Internet Explorer

or something like that. Can't remember totally what I did, I either set the build number back, or deleted the whole KEY (probably the later). Then it looked like there was no IE on the machine so it happily put the earlier version on.

Anyone?

I wish I had the answer to that one also. It probably just involves a bit of legwork to find the right registry key. But, then again Microsoft always likes to make it hard to downgrade. They want you on their path, thank you very much. There is a certain website that details a few hacks regarding Windows hidden files, etc..., so you might search around there a bit.

JD, I can answer your question: Remeber how nice and snappy IE5 was when first installed it, after suffering with IE4? Then, when you upgraded to IE 5.5, did you ever notice how, gradually, the performance deteriorated? I can say for a fact that (at least on a Windows 2000 system) the longer you have IE5, the worse the performance gets. This is especially bad when you try to open multiple windows. On my P600 with 256 MB RAM, it sometimes takes a full 10 seconds for a pop-up window to appear. I like to browse with about 10 -15 windows open. Well, for each window open, there is a corresponding deterioration.

IE5 was one of the best pieces of sofware Microsoft ever put out, and then they had to go and mess it up . They added all kinds of proprietary tags, and additional JScript functionality that only works on Windows, and creates a more security holes.

Why does the performance deteriorate? Besaides the feature bloat, IE also builds up an internal data store that there is no easy way to delete. Even though you regularly flush your temporary internet files, etc... IE still keeps a hidden store of URLs you have visited, and who knows what else. (Privacy advocates, take note!) More info about this is available at the same site I mentioned above.

And is IE6 any better? No, it adds even more proprietary crap, and crashes even more regularly than IE 4 did.

My real recommendation: download Opera or Mozilla and be done with it. But, unfortunately, we developers have to test our code in all browsers, so I am still stuck with using IE occasionally.

It depends what OS you are running. If you're running Win2K or XP then it's no go. If Win95, Win98 or NT then look at the following:

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...b;EN-US;q217344

I'm guessing these people may have the answer. Jeez before writing 'Anyone?' why not next time go to the people who write the software and see if they have the answer, it's usually the case.

Ok what I'm looking for now is a way to run multiple versions of IE....isn't there some prog that's lets your run them side by side?

You could use software such as VMware:
[URL=http://www.vmware.com/index.html http://www.vmware.com/index.html[/URL]

or alternatively just buy a cheap drive and boot from whichever one takes your fancy.

Second the Opera suggestion! I switched when my ISP installed IE 5.5 over my IE 5 without so much as a "by-your-leave." I got bit in the butt by the Comcast buyout of MediaOne - They were just supposed to be installing some "connectivity" stuff so that my computer would work with their service. They put so much garbage on both IE and OE that I've sworn off both of them, and I've never been happier!

BTW, you might want to know that the forum filters suppressed the first word of the url in your link. For those who want to go to the site, click on the link (you'll get a "could not locate sever message") then edit the address field by replacing the four "x"s at the beginning with a common vulgarism often used to express extreme disgust (but also often used as a synonym for sexual intercourse).

Karen

Mozilla annoys me. Why on earth did they have to build a platform and reinvent several wheels on their way when all we were waiting for was a fast, easy to use and standards compliant browser. They just keep bloating the project with more and more features. Why couldn't they keep focused in the beginning and then expand at a later stage. It's a real shame.

Opera is starting to look very good though, and it's Norwegian too

On the other hand, *nothing* beats the IE DOM, it's a webdevelopers dream, and if something similiar could be standarized we could start writing crossbrowser user interfaces that could really make web-based publishing easy.

I've never tried Mozilla, so I can't comment on that...but I've been really happy with Opera so far. There are a *few* glitches regarding the passage of javascript info... most of the time when I click on a javascripted button or link, it doesn't work. I have to right-click-copy the link, paste it into a new window, and remove the javascript elements to get to the page. There's also no spellcheck in the email client. But I downloaded a free-standing utility, and so far, so good. All in all, I'd never go back to IE by choice.

Karen

Hehe, I should have looked a little closer. Yes the URL is www.f#@kmicrosoft.com, and it has some very interesting info.

Sigh... I understand the typical complaints with Netscape/Mozilla, but I think that is missing at least part of the point.

The Mozilla crew were trying to think ahead beyond the browser, to a full client-side development platform. I don't think they reinvented the wheel. What they did was actually a step ahead of their time, and I think history will eventually come around a in their favor. Browse some articles at http://www.oreillynet.com/mozilla/ (especially Stop Beating the Lizard! and Infinite Extensibility with XBL. This is a good step further than just having a nice DOM.

So in the short term, Yes! Mozilla is not as nice a user experience as IE or Opera, because they were concentrating on an overall platform, and so they left the GUI optimizations to the end. At the moment, however, Mozilla 0.9.8 on my Win2K system nicely outperforms IE at page rendering and Javascript processing. I think that by the time they are done fixing the bugs and optimizing it, we will have a nice browser, and we will have the only cross-platform client-side development library in existence. This is what I used to dream of. Yes, if you just want a browser, and nothing more, then get Opera. But if you want a client-side content rendering application that can be scripted completely, then Mozilla is your only candidate at the moment.

And as far as the IE "developer's dream" DOM, I can probably say that I have done far more hacking of the IE DOM and scripting environment than most of you (It was my job for 2 years), and in the end, the problem you have is still the same: you never know when Microsoft will change things on you, and the proprietary extensions introduce as many problems as they do solutions. (example: IE for the Mac, and IE windows are two different browsers, so your nifty widget only works on Windows). IE allows you to do some basic scripting of the IE interface itself, but nothing on the level of Mozilla.

And in my experience, the Mozilla DOM has the same functionality as the IE DOM (aside from the proprietary extensions), and in some cases even exceeds the IE DOM features, and you get XUL and XBL in addition. And, it's cross-platform. I hope this is the future!

Ok I'm not going to argue about how good the Mozilla platform has become because you obviously know more than me about that.

My point is more of an economic one. By spending so much time doing all the extra stuff, Netscape completely lost their foothold in the market. Had they quickly released a standalone, fast and standards-compliant browser (Gecko with a UI), they could have saved some of their marketshare. A competitive market would be a huge advantage because it would make standards so much more important. The current situation is that MS defines the standard, and that's *not* a nice situation.

My other concern is Mozilla's desire to be everything (browser, email client, news client, wysiwyg editor(!), instant messaging/chat). You could have a pure browser that could work as a "client-side content rendering application", you don't need all the other stuff for that. Why not make all these parts separate components and define a good interface between them? They could be finished with the browser aeons ago, and work on all the other stuff now. Also, I imagine they could finish by now had they done so because a succesful release could give the developers a boost, and maybe even attract more developers.

So please understand my point here, I believe you when you say that Mozilla is very powerful, it's just the managment choices that have been made I disagree with.


I've been playing around with the IE DOM for some years myself (albeit not in the professional way you have), and what I like about it is that when I think to myself "I need this data or that method to achieve this", I normally find them, this simple fact tells me that the API is quite good. It's easy to program, and I rarely get stuck, but naturally, this is just my personal and somewhat limited experience.

I guess both the IE and Mozilla DOMs are supersets of the W3C DOM, and they both have extensions that may or may not be good ideas. Behaviours for example are a very good idea, and MS are working to make behaviours part of CSS.( http://www.w3.org/TR/becss ), they seem quite similiar to XBL. (Although XBL seems more flexible...) (Mind you, I have only looked at XBL very superficially, so I might be totally wrong here)

I haven't had a close look at the capabilities of Mozilla, but from what you're saying it might be interesting. Writing applications that use the Mozilla rendering engine for it's GUI could certainly take webapps to another level.

I'm not completely disagreeing with you, andnaess, but just pointing out some other dimensions to the situation.

Yes, it was not good business sense, in the short term. And I think they did make some development mistakes. But the thing about them inventing everything in the world instead of just making a simple browser misses the point.

Did you know that all of those extra things they did, such as Mail, News, Address Book, etc... in fact the browser interface itself are written in Javascript and XUL? The browser itself is a proof-of-concept for Mozilla/Gecko. Kinda cool, if you ask me. And there is already a commercial piece of software, based on Mozilla.

Oh, without a doubt, IE5+ is probably the best API Microsoft has ever put out. This is probably because they had a clear framework to follow, from W3C/ECMA. But the fact is that once again Microsoft has sacrificed stability and security for "featurity". You can make a complete GUI app with IE, but you also open up your computer repeatedly to malicious external code.

I'm sure there will be vulnerabilities found in XUL/XBL, but they have been designed from the ground up with the idea of creating a cross-platform, secure, remote scripting environment. That is actually quite a feat.

I'm sure if I were the executive director of Netscape, I would have been a little upset at the direction Mozilla took, but let's face it, they chose to make it an open-source project, so they gave up absolute control over Mozilla. I think the results will be worth it to us developers, in the end. We had a long-running thread about this topic at http://forums.devshed.com/showthread.php?threadid=17400 . If I may quote myself
It's all about putting things where we want them, when we want them.