More idiocy from Microsoft.

One might think that Microsoft would have heard of the profession of Web designer. Apparently not.

Internet Explorer 7 is finally out, at least four years late in my opinion, and it seems to be a pretty good bit of work apart from its horrendous font-rendering — a quick bit of testing indicates that basic type looks better and smoother in IE6 or even IE5 than in IE7. Doh. Oh, and it's rendering fonts far bigger than IE6 does, for some reason. Tsk. But that's not even the big problem. Oh no.

Microsoft have created IE7's installation files in such a way as to make it impossible to install both IE7 and IE6 on your PC. Upgrade to IE7 and IE6 vanishes. Take a backup of IE6's program files, then install IE7, and IE6 is still there but doesn't work. Now, this is fair enough for your basic everyday user, but has it really occurred to no-one at Microsoft that there are lots of us who actually design websites, who need to be able to see how those sites look in different browsers? And, since IE6 is so incredibly buggy and needs lots of special bits of code all for itself to stop it screwing pages up completely, it is absolutely vital that we can see what it does to our designs. And IE7 is no doubt, for better or worse, about to become the new standard, so we need to see it too.

It turns out that the way to get both browsers on your machine at once is to upgrade to IE7 and then install the old standalone IE6, which you can still download from various archive sites out there. But not from Microsoft. Because they're imbeciles.