It remains the world's most popular
browser in terms of market share, but how can you make Internet Explorer
better? With add-ons, as we explain
Internet Explorer may be seen as the faddy
ruddy grandfather of the browser world, a throwback to the old times when the
web was just beginning and Microsoft arrived a little late to the table.
We're not being controversial when we say
IE has not always been popular. There have been lawsuits against the monopoly
once enjoyed by the browser. And it was the case that IE was the default
browser, built into Windows and with other browsers overlooked, as Microsoft
sought to ensure as much web traffic as possible was going through its very own
software.
Internet
Explorer may be seen as the faddy ruddy grandfather of the browser world
A few years ago, though (in 2010, to be
precise), lE's fortunes fell, and it was found to have had a 49.87% share - the
first time it had fallen below 50%. It was good news for the people behind
Google and Firefox, since they have for so long been snapping at lE's heels,
pushing their flexible nature and the range of extensions and add-ons that are
available.
It's fair to say that the quality of IE
add-ons is not always as high as its rivals, and that has to do with fewer
developers working for the browser when compared to the others. For add-ons to
be truly innovative, they need large numbers of independent developers working
on them, and that isn't the case here. A look at the gallery from where you can
pick the add-ons you want shows 199 extensions on offer. It's therefore about
identifying what is needed from your browsing sessions and hopefully finding
the right solutions.
And yet Internet Explorer has the same
kinds of neat add-ons as Chrome and Firefox, and they give IE specific
capabilities and functions that can be tailored to best suit how you want to
use the browser. While the other browsers may have more extensions available to
them, the ones on IE still have many gems among them.
What you find with Internet Explorer is
that the add-ons tend to come in four flavors. There are lots of search
providers that let you narrow down searches to specific providers and not just
major search engines. You could scour eBay or a newspaper site, for example.
There are also many accelerators that let
you highlight some text and then perform a function using it, maybe sending
some words straight to social media - accelerating the task in terms of speed.
You also find a lot of web slices. These look at a website and tell you if
anything has changed, flagging up stories, for example, and giving you a
snapshot.
Finally, there are toolbars. These are
browser add-ons that allow you to search for images, videos and content easily
no matter where you are on the web. Many of them include bookmark options,
pop-up blockers, RSS readers and auto-fill capabilities.
There are a couple of hundred add-ons to
choose from, listed in a number of categories. These are videos, music, social,
search, news, shopping, travel and utilities, and the website clearly displays
the items within each one. You see a logo or a snapshot of the add-on, and when
you click through you get to see a description of the add-on before making a
decision over whether or not to install it.
It's worth bearing in mind that add-ons
tend to become obsolete when the newer versions of Internet Explorer are
released. There are also trial versions that ask for a fee after a certain
period, and often this isn't flagged up straight away, which is annoying.
These
are browser add-ons that allow you to search for images, videos and content
easily no matter where you are on the web.
Finally, be aware that there occasions when
add-ons are installed without your knowledge. This usually happens when you
install software that has little check boxes, which you can often overlook in
your haste to get to the next installation screen. Often ticked by default,
they end up sticking toolbars or whatnot on your browser, so that's why you
need to employ some careful management.
By going to Internet Explorer, selecting “Tools”
and clicking “Manage Add-ons”. You can click “Toolbars and Extensions” under
Add-on Types and then, under Show, see a list of all of your add-ons, those
that are being used on the web page you're on and those that were pre- approved
by Microsoft, a service provider or the company that put your PC together.
Searching The Web
As well as being able to download add-ons
via Microsoft's built-in add-on manager, which we'll come to later, you can
also try third- party websites and download some incredibly useful extensions
that revolutionize the way you operate Internet Explorer
Search via Google and you'll find a host of
other useful extensions. IE Asterisk Password Uncover reveals passwords from
beneath asterisks, although it doesn't always work as effectively as it should.
Enterra Download Manager is good for those
areas where you have a poor network connection, since it lets you resume
downloads that have been interrupted.
Xmarks has long proven to be useful, because
you can back your bookmarks to the cloud and then use them on other browsers.
You don't even need to sync with IE, because Xmarks is available for lots of
other browsers.
With Readabity, you can get pure sites,
stripping away images and unimportant text and ensuring you can just read the
main part of the page.
Zoomlnto allows online images to be edited
simply by right- clicking an embedded image and adjusting it for color,
contrast or brightness and manipulating it with rotation, crops, flips and
text. The picture can then be saved.
Then there's Fireshot, but it costs a fair
bit after your initial 30-day trial. It snips images from web pages, taking the
entire page layout if you need it, which is great because it's produces a
picture of parts of the page you can't see. For many people, that's worth a
$34.95 outlay.
Then
there's Fireshot, but it costs a fair bit after your initial 30-day trial. It
snips images from web pages
Those who are security conscious will like
The Web of Trust, a free link-checker. It puts a rating of the trustworthiness
of a site next to the search results and also on pages that you open. It will
show you how safe the links are on a page.
Many will like Speckle too, since it lets Webmails
and comments be composed, spell-checked and then used. The Advanced IE History
Bar gives you greater control over what you've done in the past, with some
great options for reorganizing the data.
For the most part, these are the most
useful of all and beat hands-down the offerings that are presented officially
by Microsoft via the Internet Explorer Gallery. However, if you really want to
expand your scope, then you should consider a different browser It may well be
that you see something in our other articles in this series that grabs you more
and that would be a good excuse to switch.
