10 must-see Internet Explorer 7 Addons

Microsoft tries to compete with its Windows Marketplace against the addon dominance of Firefox. The main difference between addons that you find at the Marketplace and those that you find at the Mozilla website is that some Marketplace addons are not free. This articles concentrates only on free addons for Internet Explorer 7. I try to point out similar addons that are available for Firefox to make this article useful for Firefox users as well. I do use both on different computers by the way.

Most of the addons that can be downloaded from the Windows Marketplace for Internet Explorer are actually toolbars. I would estimate that about 50% of all addons are toolbars.

1. Customize Google for Internet Explorer (108 kilobyte) - Adds Google Suggest, links to additional resources such as Wikipedia. Based on the Firefox Extension with the same name.
2. Firefly Voice Command Browser (54,3 megabyte) - Use your voice for basic commands such as forward, refresh and back. A big addon that is probably only useful for some geeks at the moment. No addon like this for Firefox as far as I know.
3. Ie7 Pro (520 kilobyte) - adds several new features including mouse gestures, an add blocker, save whole page as image, proxy switcher and more. There is not one addon that has all of the functionality, for example Adblock Plus can be used as an ad blocker, Mouse Gestures is the name for an add-on that adds mouse gestures to Firefox and Screen Grab to save websites as pdf documents.
4. IeSessions (657 kilobyte) - save the current state of all open windows and save it to a file. This is great if you have to switch computers (work, home) and want to continue where you left off. Session Saver comes close but does not offer the ability to save the sessions to a file to use at a different computer.
5. IeSpell (2 megabyte) - a handy spell checker for Internet Explorer that spell checks text input forms on websites. Very useful for bloggers, forum addicts and everyone else who is filling out a lot of text forms per day. You have to start the spell checker manually. This is a default Firefox feature which does not have to be started at all.
6. Inline Search for Internet Explorer (180 kilobyte) - mimics the website search of Firefox by showing results while still typing. Ctrl + F to start the search. This is a default Firefox feature.
7. Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar (565 kilobyte) - A great tool for web developers showing many information about the current html page. Locate and select specific elements, validate html and css and much more. Firefox users should take a look at Firebug which is in my opinion the best developer tool for Firefox.
8. RSS Feeds Toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer (544 kilobyte) - displays new feed articles in the toolbar. I never used a toolbar for this purpose but RSS Ticker could offer similar functionality.
9. Snip IT (183 kilobyte) - email selected text to recipients of your choice, works with webmailers such as gmail, hotmail and yahoo mail. Send Page by Email is the Firefox extension that has this functionality.
10. Video Downloader (198 bytes) - The usual video downloader that makes it possible to save videos from sites such as Youtube and Google Video by right-clicking in the video page and selecting Download Video from the menu. I’m using the extension Video Downloader in Firefox which does the same job.