Visual Studio 2013 requires Internet Explorer 10. If you try to install it on Windows 7 with IE8 you get the following error “This version of Visual Studio requires Internet Explorer 10”:
Visual Studio 2013 requires Internet Explorer 10
This prevents use of VS 2013 in many organizations where corporate policy forbids IE10. In practice, the VS 2013 installer just checks one registry value for IE10 presence, Visual Studio 2013 IDE doesn’t check for IE10 and at the moment I’m not aware of a single VS scenario that fails without IE10. Thus we can install and use VS 2013 without IE10 with a simple registry modification.
The value that the VS 2013 installer checks is svcVersion in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer key on 32-bit Windows and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer on 64-bit Windows (originally described by Jimmy). Any value >= 10.0.0.0 makes the installer happy.
With IE8 installed the svcVersion value is not present and you can easily add it (and later remove) with the following reg files: VS2013_FakeIE10.reg, VS2013_DeleteFakeIE10.reg. With IE9 installed the svcVersion value is present, you need to modify it before the VS installation and then revert back. The simplest modification is to change the major version from 9 to 10:
Changing IE9 to IE10 for VS 2013 installer
The VS 2013 installer checks for IE10 at the very beginning. So, the registry modification timing is following: change registry, run the VS 2013 installer, when the first setup dialog appears (see the following screenshot) revert registry changes. In this case the IE10 version string is present for only about a minute in the registry.
The first VS 2013 setup dialog after IE10 registry check
Wait for the installer to complete and run Visual Studio!
Update: Steve Teixeira from the Visual Studio Team listed VS 2013 components that require IE10 and promised to investigate support for customers installing and running VS 2013 on machines without IE10.
Update 2: Visual Studio 2013 installers were updated to enable VS 2013 to be installed on Windows 7 machines running IE8 or IE9. See details here.
https://tabsstudio.com/
Making Visual Studio perfect 
Thanks for giving me credit and I hate that you have to explain it so simply that way others can understand how to apply the fix. Did you happen to see what the VS Team posted? I think we finally got Microsoft’s attention with forcing IE10 on developers. I really hope they remove it.
Jimmy,
Yes, I’ve added the link to the VS team status update.
Cool, seems to work
VS2013 no longer requires IE10 to install – so this workaround is no longer needed. MS do say that some stuff won’t work as expected though – see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2906882
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http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18843156/vs2013rc-requires-ie10-but-i-need-not-want-ie8
Thank you very much for this work-around.
Awesome, this still works in Visual Studio 2015 as the dependency on IE10 still persist. Thanks
Thank you very much. Works in a Windows 7 running in VMware virtual machine.