Microsoft Office

5 great add-ons for Internet Explorer

Add-ons are programs that add features to a web browser or change the way it works. If you’ve ever wished Internet Explorer could do something new or differently, chances are there’s an add-on out there that will fulfill your wish.

Power users love IE7Pro

IE7Pro is a free add-on for Internet Explorer 7 that is indispensable to many in their day-to-day work. It adds a raft of new abilities to the web browser, including advanced management of tabbed browsing settings, a simple download manager, spelling checks of text you enter in web forms, autoscrolling of webpages, quick searching of page text, ad and Flash blocking, custom keyboard shortcuts, and much more.

One of the favorite features of this add-on is its ability to automatically refresh a tab at a specified interval. In my job as an IT coordinator. This feature is also quite useful for seeing the latest messages coming into your web-based e-mail inbox and for keeping track of online auctions and message boards.

Do you want to search the Internet for something you’re reading about on a particular webpage? Instead of copying and pasting the text into a search box, simply select the word or phrase, right-click it, then click Search With to search for the term using Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, or another search engine of your choice. The results appear in a new tab.

Have you ever closed a tab by mistake? No worries—click Tab History in the IE7Pro menu, and then click Reopen Last Closed Tab. Did Internet Explorer crash? IE7Pro will offer to restore the tabs that were open when the crash occurred.

Road warriors who frequently switch Internet connections will love IE7Pro’s proxy switcher. Instead of manually changing the proxy configuration each time you switch connections, you can quickly select previously used proxy servers from a menu.

Simple but effective: Find As You Type
To search for text on a webpage in Internet Explorer, normally you must press CTRL+F, type the search term into the Find window and then click Next. Find As You Type is an add-on that allows you to see all matches to your search term as it is typed. Matches are instantly highlighted on the page. If you type a combination of letters that does not appear on the page, an audio cue sounds and the Find box turns red.

Organize your downloads with LeechGet
An Internet connection can be unreliable, and far too often many have felt the frustration that comes from having a large download interrupted. Restarting the download in Internet Explorer is hit-or-miss; sometimes one does lose the partial download, and sometimes one doesn’t. One favorite is a product called LeechGet. It operates as a standalone program that integrates with Internet Explorer by managing downloads you click in the browser.

LeechGet allows you to manage multiple downloads, pause and resume, schedule downloads to occur at a particular time, and split your downloads into smaller “tasks.” You can also impose a “speed limit” on downloads that restricts how much bandwidth they can use, thus leaving you some bandwidth to browse the web. The program includes a download history and speed monitor.

LeechGet has two versions: a free version that limits you to one download at a time and does not include updates, and a paid version that removes those restrictions and includes technical support. To download it, go to the LeechGet website.

Make RSS shine with RikReader
Since the release of Internet Explorer 7 and its integrated RSS feed reader. You can subscribe to hundreds of different feeds (For more information about RSS feeds, see The wonderful world of RSS feeds).

The feed reader has a couple of glaring deficiencies. First, there is no way to mark all feeds as read. Second, there is no way to view all of my feeds at the same time. RikReader is one feed reader of choice. (Technically, RikReader is a program, rather than an add-on, but it integrates with the feed-subscription capabilities of Internet Explorer.)

RikReader displays the feeds you have subscribed to in Internet Explorer. It offers both a conventional two-pane view, with headlines on one side and article text on the other, and an impressive “newspaper” view that displays the full text of each article or blog post in a multicolumn layout. In either view, the text size can be easily reduced or enlarged via a slider. By typing a term in the search box, you can instantly filter a feed so that only articles containing that term are displayed.

Me.dium: An interaction revolution
Humans are inherently social creatures, and we love to interact with others online—hence the popularity of instant messaging, social networking sites, and online forums. In the end, though, web surfing has basically remained a solitary experience. We’ve always known that lots of other people are likely to be looking at the same page as we are, at the same time, but we couldn’t see or interact with them—until now.

Me.dium is an add-on that allows you to peek behind the curtain of the web. After you install it, a Me.dium “map” appears in the left pane of the browser. The map displays an icon representing you and the website you are viewing, along with icons of other Me.dium users who are visiting the same site. Users you’ve added to your Me.dium friends list show up as yellow, and others show up as blue. Surrounding your icon are icons representing related sites that you or other Me.dium users have visited. For example, if you’re at a news site, Me.dium will show you other news sites; if you are at a bank’s website it will suggest other banking and financial sites. You can click an icon to go directly to that site.

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