Lord of the Web

While Firefox has enjoyed a healthy plug-in community for several years, Internet Explorer has lagged behind somewhat. Thats all changing with the arrival of IE8. Internet explorer’s add-ons started becoming more powerful and varied once IE7 was released and with the onset of IE8 they are set to come on par with those of Firefox, if not better.

IE7pro is a free add-on (for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and support for IE8 in development ) that attempts to address the gap between Internet Explorer and Firefox. With an emphasis on ease of use, security and customisation, it does a pretty good job. IE7Pro modifies IE’s default tab management features to add several options like double clicking to close the tab, undo closing tabs, enable Super Drag n Drop where dragging a link and dropping it anywhere else on the page opens it in a new tab or dragging and dropping any selected chunk of text opens the results of searching it via the default search engine. IE7Pro also adds an Ad blocker that uses a blacklist of sites to block ads in web pages. It can also block ads delivered as rich media such as Flash movies. It also allows crash recovery, which lets a browsing session be restored in case the browser crashed. The contents of a tab can be saved as an image as well.

Mouse gesture support is also added by IE7Pro. It ships with a set of predefined gestures which can be customized later. IE7Pro adds support for UserJS and Greasemonkey-like scripts, these are site-specific Javascript code that adds certain functionality to websites, or modifies the behavior of certain aspects of sites to make it compatible with the browser. It also includes a proxy switcher, and a word-wheeled in-page search bar, which overrides Internet Explorer’s search bar, like the search functionality in Firefox and the InlineSearch add-in for IE. Version 0.9.18 also adds a spell checker.

IE7Pro adds a button in the status bar which notifies the status of whether proxies are being used, and provides access to the configuration interface, and certain other functionality. Since version 1.0, it also adds a feature it calls EasyHomepage which is similar to ‘Speed Dial Browsing’ in Opera 9. It shows thumbnail renderings of 9 web sites in a grid, which can be visually identified and opened.

Mini Download Manager or MiniDM is the download manager included with IE7Pro. Unlike other download managers, the MiniDM is intended to be lightweight, and does not included as many features as traditional download mangers, hence the name. The download manager has features such as pausing and resuming downloads,new task supporting multi links, drag & drop, https support library auto-download button, trayicon display download status,support delete history & real file, save file using timestamp from server- enough to satisfy many users and still remain lightweight.

With some features of IE7pro being made available in IE8, still it remains a very good add-on for IE. The support for IE8 is expected to be released along with the full release of the browser.