Standalone sandboxed IE6, IE7, IE8 executables (Recovered after a takedown) | Hacker News Reader

Standalone sandboxed IE6, IE7, IE8 executables (Recovered after a takedown)

iecss.com

281 pointspaulirish70 comments

If you didn't click the speaker icon in the upper right, do it!

I'll listen to this song every time when I get bored on Grooveshark.

That is the most amazing soundtrack for a web page that I have ever heard.

There is another package called "Utilu IE Collection"[1] which I have found more stable than Spoon.net versions. You can even install IE 1.0

[1] http://utilu.com/IECollection/

I just want to second this recommendation. It's a very thorough collection, quite stable, and helpfully has IE Developer Toolbar preinstalled on IE5 and up.

Utilo greyed out IE 7 and 8 for me, and installed a crashing IE6 on Windows 7 32 bit. I have IE9 installed, so that may be been the prob.

Same thing happened on Windows Vista 32bit with IE8 Installed...

Really great. Specially since as of now, Feb 21 2011, the spoon downloads on this article were taken out (it happend 7 days ago).

And the backup plan: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6168696/Spoon.net_-_Sandboxe...

I'm not getting any web seed activity. I'm guessing it might be due to the seeds linking to /spoon/ie6.exe/ etc, with the last slash included, which doesn't go anywhere if you visit it with a browser. Know of a way to edit the file?

doesn't your torrent client have the ability to add arbitrary webseeds to any torrent? just use that.

Unfortunately no, though I'm hunting for one that does, and lets me save it.

Do you have python? And a BitTorrent encoding library: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bencode/1.0 ?

Then I have something which will help: http://pastie.org/1559062

It conforms to http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html and can (of course) be trivially upgraded to conform to http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0017.html also.

Happy downloading.

Yeah, I don't think uTorrent created the urls properly. TPB reports "temporarily disabled" for editing the torrent though :/ I'll bump my seeding cap up a bit to help.

Fixed it for you :) Also removed the now-non-existent tbp tracker (unless I've missed the news?)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/363028/temporary/Spoon.net%20Sandbox...

edit: uh, I think. Transmission is throwing fits and not writing to disk...

This is really one of the only solutions for testing against the various IE images. The IE team tries to have people use their VPC images (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=...), but they expire every 6 months (and twice I've had to remind the team that they haven't updated the images post-expiration).

Microsoft also provides Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=...

Expression Web SuperPreview is really cool, until you try to interact with your page/site in any way. It can't even handle clicking on a link, let alone submits/POSTs.

> Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview

I wasn't sure wether it was the real name or a joke until I cliked on the link... For the record: it is the real name.

I actually now regret having not used the /full/ name, "Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer". ;P

I do IE6 testing in a Win2K VM, which has the advantage of being rather light on memory.

But I find MS's apparent determination to make webdevs' lives as difficult as possible extremely frustrating. The time-limited VMs that used to work on Fusion weren't perfect, but they showed good faith, and the Spoon solution was really nice.

What possible loss do they think follows from this exploitation of their IP??

This is great. I copied these .exe files out of my temp internet files a couple of years ago and have been using them ever since. Far more practical, and portable, than using VMs.

I've got them in my Dropbox so I can even run a bit of cross-browser testing when I'm coding on someone else's PC.

There were exes in your temp internet folder? How exactly did this website work?

Anyway, heres to possibly only having to run one vm (not likely since we test 18 browser configurations on average), but you get my drift

The benefit to the VPC images is that they can be converted to something VirtualBox understands, and used under OSX and Linux, as well. Still a PITA to have to do that every 6 months, though.

The only time I've ever tried to convert one of the VPC images, the guest OS decided that my hardware had changed too much and demanded that I reactivate it. Unfortunately, activation isn't available for these images, and the image became unusable. What's your trick?

Four months now, and Microsoft recently made changes to the activation code such that if it can detect you're not running in VirtualPC (on Windows, natch), then it disables itself. I've tried multiple avenues of converting the latest timebomb (came out a couple of weeks ago) to both VirtualBox and VMware and have been completely unsuccessful.

"Developers, developers, developers!"

I don't see the benefit, they will still expire. Make your own VM and install these browsers on it.

The benefit is that you don't have to own a MS license, whereas you would if you were creating your own VM.

I suspect you're already violating the license terms by coercing it to run on Linux, so what's the difference?

I've found that signing up for a Microsoft tech net subscription is a decent way to get access to various os/browsers without having to deal with any timed expirations. You can download any of the currently supported Microsoft OSs and setup a bunch of virtual Machines. Plus, office and other application software is available as well.

I'm certainly not thrilled with this setup as I wish Microsoft could just allow different IE versions to be installed side by side. But the subscription cost is $200 in the US, so basically if you were planning to by a license to any piece of Microsoft software you might as well get this instead.

Why not http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage instead?

oops in fact the page talks about deficiencies in IETester for Flash, printing, etc.

IETester has always been convenient and sufficient for all my practical purposes. I think it's good to let people know about it.

IETester also seems to use the OS's installed version of IE's script engine, and not the target browsers engine.

Sadly it doesn't seem to run under Wine.

Yeah, I'm getting this error:

fixme:x11drv:sync_window_opacity LWA_COLORKEY not supported

Wine is not a reliable platform for testing browser compatibility. Even when I have gotten IE working with ies4linux or a similar thing, Wine's IE still misrenders portions of the page occasionally (of course, depending on what version of Wine you're running -- I haven't tested IE in Wine for a long time). You need to use IE on a real Windows installation to verify it will work correctly for your users, Wine is just too much of a moving target.

... and they're gone.

looks like there's a mirror here... no idea how it got there...

https://www.transferbigfiles.com/efcac5e7-121d-44a2-b790-35a...

Wow, that's weird. It's like they're multiplying...

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=S1B3JZL9

It's reached its download limit! Any chance you know of another mirror out there?

I'm getting 404s on all the .exe files. Gone already?

Sadly, I got the same.

This combined with MicroXP resulted in a ~500MB VirtualBox image with IE6,7,8 -- very impressive.

I'm having a tough time running the IE7 executable in Windows 7. The VM popup shows up like IE6 and IE8, but the program window closes immediately.

Before I dig too far into it, is anyone else running into the same thing?

I've been seeing recommendations to run them under compatibility mode if problems crop up; try that, and if it doesn't work I can boot 7 and give a couple things a try myself.

same problem here, compatibility mode and disabling desktop composition does nothing. IE7 just pops and closes. IE6 and IE8 run fine. Win7 64 bit here.

It was always really easy to "recover" these around the web, I've had all their old VMs for a couple years - including old Chrome and old Firefox.

IETester may be a better way though http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

But find me a better way to run IE9 though on XP than a vmware box running Windows7 ?

Two gigabyte image just to run IE9, yuk.

The IE7.exe wont run on my system (Win7 x64)

Did you try running it in compatibility mode and as admin? It seems IE7 on win7/64bit is hit or miss :/

I did, thanks for the suggestion.

> each full image of Windows dies 4 times a year

Does anyone understand what he's referring to here?

He's referring to these: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=...

They are time-limited virtual PC images which expire after three of four months.

Ah, I've never heard of those before. Are these commonly used by webdevs? bbatsell said they now only work on Windows, and considering that a lot of (most?) webdevs use Macs, they're probably not too useful.

>considering that a lot of (most?) webdevs use Macs

I've never heard this ...

Personal experience only, but I don't know the last time I've seen a programming or web-tech related webcast that wasn't made on a Mac.

Why don't more people use Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview?

I've never heard of it, or seen it referenced on any design blog, or seen any marketing of it whatsoever. I'm not necessarily claiming that I'm an accurate sample of the web development/design community, but it certainly seems to be pretty under represented.

From what I can tell from it's product page, it seems to have a very gimmicky marketing-speak write up (count the number of times the product is named!). It also doesn't let you run IE7 and IE8 at the same time.

I use this product, at times.

I think it's an example of a good intention on Microsoft's part that hasn't been executed or marketed incredibly well.

Any web developer worth salt has to preview their work on IE6-IE9. And everyone has to jump through hoops to make this work (And no, VMs are not an acceptable solution. Why should I bog down my machine with a VM when I just need an extra freaking browser?)

So there comes Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview. How did they even come up with such a name? What it does is it allows you to open several frames side-by-side, each with a version of IE. It's a great idea, it's JUST what I needed. But what it doesn't let you do is actually interact with the pages. You can only see, not click. Want to test a JavaScript behavior? Sorry.

The gimmicky name and the lack of marketing evidently obscure it further. No surprise you've never heard of it. I completely accidentally stumbled across it last year.

Edit: Link with screenshots: http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/dd565874.aspx

Because it only gives you screenshots, not actual webpages you can click. That might help find glaring CSS bugs, but is relatively useless otherwise.

I'll stick with my standalone (non-MS dev) VM images, thank you very much.

A way to get even older IEs working on, say, Linux with Wine is IEs4Linux: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

This package largely automates the process of downloading and installing IE5, IE5.5, and IE6, with beta support for IE7, IE8, and IE9, and support for IE1, IE1.5, and IE2 almost as a joke.

(Note: To install it on Ubuntu, update Wine using the PPA found at this website: http://www.winehq.org/download/deb)

So it's not quite overlapping, but it's a similar project.

Last time I checked they were pretty useless. Went the VM route for testing on windows.

Ugh! Why not use ie 9 instead?

As the site made clear, these are useful for developers that want a quick way to test that their site works in multiple older versions of IE.

Ie9 allows you to switch the display mode between IE7, IE8, IE9. However, it does not allow IE6.

Also, I'm not yet certain how accurate the older modes are. I did write some code with a known IE7 bug that worked fine in 8 & 9... and which I switched IE9 to IE7 mode the bug occurred as I had expected it to. (Press F12 in IE9 to see the option to select display mode). Apologies if this sounds kind of rambly, as I just woke up...

Downloading these either way so that I can do some additional testing.

For the most part the compatibility modes work, but there are inconsistencies - such as bugs that appear in IE7, but not in IE8 in compatibility mode. Its a headache, and one that's somewhat remedied by just using the actual browsers.

Thanks for the info. That's what I was hoping to find out by having these. They now live happily within my suite of various development/testing tools.

Does Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview (Microsoft's official tool for this purpose, which comes with the various rendering engines plugged into a meta-browser) have these same deficiencies?

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