Internet Explorer

What works

• Installation using the recipe below.
• Rendering behavior matched IE4 on Windows 98 for all tested web pages.
• Basic navigation, internet options menu, about screen, fullscreen mode, Ctrl+F
• Downloading a file

What does not

Several things, but nothing that affects page behavior/rendering:

• Adding a page to favorites (crashes the browser)
• Opening a link in a new window
• When selecting text, the highlight color is frequently wrong compared to Windows (e.g. some of the text at WineHQ becomes white with a white highlight while selected)
• After entering and exiting fullscreen mode, interacting with any windows except IE4 may become impossible until Alt+Tab is used
• Explorer bars (the search bar only fails on the first use, while the rest are consistently broken)
• The hidden credits easter egg
• Using middle-click to scroll
• Menu bar behavior is slightly off

There are also issues that occur due to the age of the browser rather than any fault of Wine. For instance, many (all?) HTTPS sites fail to load at all, but the same thing happens on Windows.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Printing, plug-ins, changing most options.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

This is my recipe to install IE4 with Wine (slightly improved since last time) - you may want to use a dedicated wineprefix to avoid compatibility issues between modern programs and this old version of IE. 1. Open winecfg and change the reported Windows version to Windows NT 4.0. 2. Switch to the libraries tab and add overrides for the following: advpack, iexplore.exe, jscript, mshtml, shdocvw, urlmon, vbscript, wininet 3. Switch to the 'drives' tab and remove the z: drive, then close winecfg. 4. Run 'wine iexplore -unregserver' from a terminal 5. Run this command from a terminal, but replace "$HOME/.wine" with the location of your wineprefix if you've changed it: rm -f $HOME/.wine/drive_c/{Program\ Files/Internet\ Explorer/iexplore.exe,windows/system32/{advpack.dll,inetcpl.cpl,mshtml.dll,schannel.dll,shdocvw.dll,urlmon.dll,vbscript.dll,wininet.dll}} 6. Copy the self-extractor to Wine's C: drive and run it to extract the setup files. 7. Run the 'IE4SETUP.EXE' file from the directory the extractor created. 8. Choose no when it asks whether you want to locate WINDOWS.HLP. 9. After restarting the Wine session, the installer will produce four errors while installing Java packages - just click OK to each and ignore them. 10. When the errors stop, IE4 is ready to use: wine 'C:/Program Files/Internet Explorer/iexplore.exe'

This note was originally added to IE Version 5, but may be relevant to all versions.

Don't run IE on an RW mounted DOS partition !
Pretty problematic directory renaming/corruption can happen.
This seems to happen if Wine doesn't have access to certain Windows registry keys.
Renames e.g. "Program Files" to "$!$!$!$!.pfr" and does other horrible things.
BTW, it does not only happen with IE, as it seems to be a generic Windows Setup process of Explorer which is doing this, which can be launched under multiple circumstances.
To be safe, use a backup copy only, i.e. copy all relevant windows files over e.g. to an ext2 partition.