IE6 or IE7 on Jaunty with Wine

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IE6 (Internet Explorer 6)  is dying and with every month that goes by I give less and less effort to supporting it, but IE7 is still relatively popular. I have been relying on other machines to test IE7 but that gets kinda old. Running Windows in virtual environment or dualbooting have been other ways I have tried to solve the problem of testing Microsoft’s troublesome browsers. Today I managed to figure out a relatively simple way of getting IE7 running with Wine on Ubuntu 9.04. The first step is to go to the Wine download page which will walk you through installing the latest Wine.  For me it was 1.1.26. You will also want to get winetricks. Here is where it gets just a little technical. I tried a couple different methods and this is way I finally got things to work.

  1. From a terminal, navigate to where you downloaded the winetricks file and type “sh winetricks”.
  2. In the window that appears check the box for “ie6” and click OK.
  3. Follow the prompts for the IE6 installer.
  4. Test IE6 by opening Applications->Wine->Browse C:/ Drive … Program Files->Internet Explorer — right click on “IEXPLORE.EXE” and select “open with ‘Wine…’” .

IE6scrnsht Getting IE6 running is just a preliminary step that I found to be necessary in order to get to IE7. If you wanted to stop here you could. If you are on a 32bit version of Juanty you can go farther and get IE7 running - I wasn’t able to get it running on 64bit systems:

  1. download IE7.
  2. Close any running IE windows.
  3. Right click on the .exe and select “open with ‘Wine…‘”
  4. Follow the prompts as per a normal windows install except that you should uncheck the updates option
  5. start IE7 the same way you previously started IE6

Screenshot here… Have fun!!!

2020 update

IE is so dead!