| Firefox Add-On: IE Tab |
| Monday, March 09 2009 |
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Obviously I use Firefox as my primary web browser, but occasionally I need to view a web site using IE. You know the sites that I’m talking about. The ones that look like complete ass or just don’t function properly unless viewed with IE. It’s unfortunate that we even have to worry about such things in today’s day and age, but that’s the reality we live in. And when that need arises, I almost never open IE itself; I use IE Tab instead.
The IE Tab add-on allows you to easily see how a web page will be displayed in IE within a Firefox tab, which it does by invoking the IE rendering engine to make this happen. IE Tab adds a Firefox icon in the bottom-right corner of the Firefox statusbar, and when you click that icon, it re-renders the web page using IE. It also changes that Firefox icon to the IE icon, thus always providing a clear indication as to what browser engine is being used to view that particular web page.
IE Tab also adds options to the Firefox context menu, so when you right-click on a web page, you can select “View Page in IE Tab”, which is the same thing as clicking on the Firefox icon in the bottom-right corner.
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Clicking the “View Page in Ext. App.” option shown in the context menu above has a slightly different effect: it launches a brand new IE instance outside of Firefox and tries to open the web page that way. Having IE Tab launch IE externally is the default, but can be changed to launch something else, such as Opera.
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Another thing IE Tab allows you to do is set pre-defined sites that will always open with IE. As you can see below, if I open windowsupdate.com it will automatically render with IE.
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And there you have it. IE Tab is one of the most used Firefox add-ons out there with over over 21 million downloads, which just goes to show how needed it is. It’s currently at version 1.5.20090207 and can be downloaded and installed here.
