Designer makes IE developer-friendly

A clever designer figured out how to run IE 5, 5.5, and 6 concurrently in windows XP. I'm going through it right now, installing the two old browsers so I can test on them, but the first thought that comes to mind after "woo hoo! finally!" is "why in the hell didn't MS and their developer network show anyone how to do this years ago?"

Why on earth would they not want you to be able to do this? Since the instructions are so simple, I'm going to assume someone, somewhere in the IE browser group (which I hear was disbanded sometime in 2002) knew all along this was possible. What possible explanation would keep them from releasing the simple info and making developers the world over happier to use MS products? And how many developers asked MS how they could do this (starting since IE 5 came out) that they ignored? [via sidesh0w]

update: worked like a charm, and uncovered several display bugs in some sites. I also remembered that there were at least two IE developers on a popular web design list I used to follow daily, and the requests for running IE 3, 4, 5, 5.5, and 6 on the same machine came in at least once a month, if not more often. Why did they sit on their hands about this?

another update: the bare minimum of files for each browser, ready to run once unzipped.