Internet Explorer

What works

Installing and using the browser with some hacks. About screen, some toolbar customization, fullscreen mode, some web pages, viewing options, and view source work.

What does not

The browser crashes on many web pages. The crashes become much less frequent after setting a builtin-only override for jscript in winecfg, but then the behavior of some web pages isn't correct (compared to IE 5.0 on Windows).

Favorites are buggy (you need to restart the browser for newly added favorites to work correctly). Viewing the help file doesn't work. Trying to open a link in a new windows just gives an error message. Trying to use the "map drive" function (optional addition to the toolbars) crashes or hangs the browser. Toolbars can't be combined or separated, and the back and forward buttons behave as the history dropdown arrows (which are missing) should. Sidebars must be opened twice to display properly, and only the favorites sidebar works correctly anyway.

What was not tested

Didn't compare web page behavior in Wine vs. Windows extensively after finding that the browser crashes a lot unless rendering is compromised. Also, most non-default options and add-ons weren't tested.

Additional Comments

Used IE 5.0 SP2. The recipe I posted last time stopped working, so here's a new one (which is less broken anyway):

1. Run 'wine iexplore -unregserver'
2. Open winecfg and change the Windows version to Windows 98.
3. Switch to the libraries tab and add overrides for the following:
advpack, browseui, iexplore.exe, inetcpl.cpl, jscript, mshtml, shdoclc, shdocvw, shlwapi, urlmon, wininet
4. Remove this file from Wine's c: drive:
C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe
5. Remove these files from Wine's C:\windows\system32:
advpack.dll browseui.dll comctl32.dll inetcpl.cpl jscript.dll mshtml.dll shdoclc.dll shdocvw.dll shell32.dll shlwapi.dll urlmon.dll wininet.dll
6. Run the unpacker (ie501sp2.exe)
7. Extract shell32.dll from IE4SHL95.CAB in the newly created "IE 5.01 SP2 FULL" directory and copy it to Wine's system32.
8. Run the installer (IE5SETUP.EXE) from the same directory, and choose a minimal installation when prompted
9. When asked if you'd like to locate WINDOWS.HLP, choose no. Also ignore an error message that pops up after "restarting."
10. Run the browser like so:
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.