Last week we reported, somewhat sceptically I’m happy to say, about a piece of research by a company called AptiQuant Psychometric Consulting, that said that people who used Internet Explorer had lower IQs than people who used other browsers. The research “measuring the effects of cognitive ability on the choice of web browser” was apparently [...]

Security firm NSS Labs have been running some tests on different modern web browsers to see how they defend and protect their users against socially-engineered malware.  This is malware that attempts to trick users into installing it, much in the way Apple Mac users have been suffering with the recent spate of ‘Mac Defender’ malware. [...]

Nope, this isn’t a belated April fool, with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser only just out of the door and not even delivered to many users yet through Windows Update, the first platform preview of their next version, IE10 is already available to grab at the Microsoft IE Test Drive website. The first demonstration of the [...]

Google recently launched behavioral targeted ads for AdSense. This means AdSense displays adverts not only on the context of the webpage, but on the context of your browsing history. The aim is to provide more relevant and efficient adverts, but tracking cookies being used across hundreds of thousands of websites raises obvious privacy issues, as [...]

A complaint of browser developer Opera that Microsoft has undermined competition by integrating its own Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system is currently being investigated by the European Union. If Microsoft is found guilty the company could face hefty fines and be forced to untie Internet Explorer from its next operating system installment Windows [...]

Accelerators are a new feature of Microsoft’s upcoming web browser Internet Explorer 8 that have recently been ported to other web browsers like Firefox in the form of add-ons. Like the name implies Accelerators are supposed to speed up the web browsing experience. Not by squeezing another Megabit out of the pipe but by providing [...]

Microsoft has released a cumulative security update for Internet Explorer 7 and 8 that fixes several critical vulnerabilities in the web browser. It is recommended to update Internet Explorer as soon as possible to fix those vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities are rated critical for Internet Explorer versions running under Windows XP or Windows Vista and moderate [...]

Microsoft is expected to release Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 in the near future. Internet Explorer 8 is Microsoft’s new flagship browser that is expected to be released later this year. Release Candidate is a follow up on the public beta of Internet Explorer 8. Users who cannot wait until Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 [...]

The Manual Works Prompter is a sub-100 Kilobyte teleprompter software that runs on the Windows operating system. It makes use of so called HTML applications (hta) that run on Internet Explorer. They are basically a mixup of HTML and dynamic HTML files. The teleprompter is basically like the ones seen on TV or during presentations. [...]

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 display the menu bar below the address bar in the header area of the web browser. The menu bar contains links to menus like File, Tools or Help while the address bar is being used to load websites and perform searches on the Internet. Most web browsers [...]

One of the areas where Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is lagging behind is favorites management. Favorite is just another term for bookmarks in Internet Explorer. Even the latest beta of Internet Explorer 8 does not come with effective tools to manage the favorites in the web browser. One of the main functions missing is a favorites [...]

Microsoft Internet Explorer does not come with the options to backup its settings. This can be problematic for users who want to backup their Internet Explorer data for security reasons or before migrating to another computer. Internet Explorer Backup is a data backup software that can backup various Internet Explorer related settings and options such [...]

Day 17 of the Ghacks Christmas Giveaway. The giveaway is slowly reaching the end with another week to go before it closes its door for this year on December 24. Today’s application is the popular password manager, note taking and form filler RoboForm. RoboForm is available for Microsoft Windows operating systems and can be installed [...]

Internet Explorer’s Runonce page can cause some of the most annoying problems for Internet users. It was designed to give users the chance to configure some of the settings after the first start of Internet Explorer. It is basically a form that has to be completed so that the Runonce page will not be displayed [...]

Several new web browser versions have been released in the last days which made it important to benchmark the latest official versions and the latest development versions of Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera to see how the browsers compare to each other. All browsers were installed on a Windows XP Service Pack [...]

How would an effective and secure cookie management look like? Most users would probably answer that it would make use of whitelists, blacklists and temporary cookies. The whitelist would contain trusted sites that require cookies to function properly. Trust would mean that you would keep the cookies on your system even after closing the session [...]

One of the main areas that Microsoft is lacking behind with Internet Explorer in comparison to browsers like Opera or Firefox is the extensibility. Yes, there are plugins for Internet Explorer but the community is not thriving like those of the other browsers. The main reason might be that it is more difficulty to create [...]

Working on multiple computers or on several days on one computer makes the use of sessions useful. The Internet Explorer Sessions extensions IE Sessions (via IESessions: save and retrieve your sessions on Internet Explorer ) adds that capability to Microsoft Internet Explorer. It is always up to the software developer what a session really consists [...]

Internet Explorer assigns a security zone to any website that the user is visiting. Next to the two generic zones Internet (all that are not in another zone), Local Intranet (local sites) are Trusted sites and Restricted Sites. Trusted sites will usually have a lower security level than restricted sites. One could for instance move [...]

The Firefox disk cache is usually located on the same drive that Firefox got installed. In Windows it is located in the Documents and Settings folder. It usually is a good idea to have temporary directories located on a fast hard drive. In this case the hard drive that Firefox was running on was a [...]

Greasemonkey is a browser extension for Mozilla Firefox which can run so called userscripts that can change elements and information on websites in real-time. Some prime examples include link checkers, removing elements on a website or embedding price comparison information on shopping pages. Since then Greasemonkey has been expanded and – at least – been [...]

Most users have their favorite websites that they visit everyday. The weather report, tv program, world news, a forum or a blog with daily technology news. What if it would be possible to extract the important bits of those websites and combine them into one new site that would update itself automatically and present the [...]

Many users maintain multiple accounts on various websites, for example two Gmail accounts one for business and one for private contacts or multiple Facebook or MySpace accounts. Using multiple accounts is usually privacy related but it could also be used for other purposes. The main problem that most web browsers have with multiple accounts on [...]

Many users have to work with several web browsers. Could be that they are webmasters who have to check the design of their websites in the most popular browsers or because they have to use a different browser at work than they use at home. There are more possible scenarios why someone would use more [...]

Unlike its name would suggest Repair IE is more an Internet Explorer tweaking program than one that can actually repair the Microsoft browser. The closest thing coming to repairing the browser is the ability to reset functions of Internet Explorer that might be the cause for problems with it. Repair IE is a portable application [...]

Cnet ran some tests on the JavaScript performance of selected browsers like the latest Firefox version, Firefox beta and Google Chrome builds. JavaScript performance was in the news since Google and the Mozilla Firefox development team announced improvements in JavaScript performance. Cnet used the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark to test browser performance of the browsers. There [...]

Web Archive Viewer is a plugin for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that provides access to file archives before the download. It displays the contents of zip and rar archives and gives Internet Explorer users the option to download selected files instead of the complete archive. This can be useful if only a few files are needed [...]

Choosing secure passwords is important to protect the user accounts from being accessed by unauthorized users. The problem that arises for all users is that secure passwords are harder to remember. Writing them down is one solution to the problem. The other possibility that is more reasonable is using a password management software. A good [...]

The fact that Google Chrome is sending information about anything that the user types into the Google Chrome Omnibox seems to have caused quite a stir on the Internet with reports about how to disable that “feature” being posted on every blog and website that publishes Internet news. What it basically does is to send [...]

Webmasters never know what they are up to when testing websites in various versions of Internet Explorer. It might look fine in Internet Explorer 6 but Internet Explorer 8 might break it. It is therefor of uttermost importance to test a website in different versions of Internet Explorer before releasing it to the public. The [...]

Some users reported errors after installing the second beta of Internet Explorer 8. Steven Hodson over at Winextra was one of the first to point out display problems with elements not being in their right place on websites and a huge serious problem with the Share This plugin on websites which locks Internet Explorer 8 [...]

Windows Live is rapidly maturing into a very real and competitive set of products. Each individual service isn’t the best solution, excluding Windows Live Writer perhaps, but it does have a huge advantage over all other alternatives; the Windows Live ID. The Live ID gives a unified profile across the whole Live suite and is [...]

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 introduced several exciting new features to the Microsoft browser which hit the Internet by surprise. No one would have thought that Microsoft would add that much value to the second beta of Internet Explorer. The Internet Explorer 8 development team did a good job at introducing new features and also [...]

I was pretty excited about the release of Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 by the Internet Explorer development team yesterday. If you would have asked me before that day I would have never agreed that a new Internet Explorer version could be exciting. But that version is full of surprises. It seems that they have [...]

The second beta of Microsoft’s upcoming browser Internet Explorer 8 has been released today to the public according to the Internet Explorer Blog. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is available for all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 / 2008 and the languages English, German, Japanese and Chinese [...]

HTTP Watch is a HTTP monitoring plugin for Microsoft Internet Explorer that can give a detailed information about a website or application that is loading in the browser. The main reasons for using an application like HTTP Watch are troubleshooting, performance tuning and security checks. It’s mostly useful for webmasters but regular users might find [...]

I received an email today from a user who was asking me how to download the latest version of Internet Explorer. I was a bit puzzled by that request but decided to investigate Internet Explorer Download possibilities. Internet Explorer 7 is the latest release version of Internet Explorer. It ships with Windows Vista which means [...]

Internet Explorer’s Content Advisor works as a safeguard and web filter so that family members might not open websites that are not suited for them. The Content Advisor is pretty much a content filter and makes use of several filtering mechanisms to prevent family members from accessing inappropriate websites. Internet Explorer Content Advisor makes use [...]

Each browser is limited cookies in two ways. The first is a per domain cookie limit that allows a single domain to only store x cookies before the oldest gets erased to make room for the new cookie. The second is an overall cookie limit which erases the oldest cookies when the limit is reached. [...]

Microsoft introduced a phishing filter in Internet Explorer 7 which checks every website the users visits with a remote database to prevent that phishing websites get accessed. Phishing websites are fake websites that look like a popular website but have the purpose to record credit card information and login credentials of a user to fuel [...]

The IE7 Tweak Utility is a portable software program that allows the user to change a few settings in Internet Explorer 7 that cannot be changed directly in the browser. I assume they are handled in the Registry but have not checked if that is true. The tool provides a clean interface after starting it [...]

Firefox users are flooded with add-ons that provide them with the option to download videos from video portals like Youtube but Internet Explorer users are somewhat left in the rain. The Youtube File Hack Tool tries to change this by offering Microsoft Internet Explorer users a way to download videos from Youtube easily. This plugin [...]

Internet Explorer users are a bit at the bottom when it comes to useful add-ons for their browser. Sure, there is IE7 Pro which is a fantastic add-on but can you name other ones? I’m not using Internet Explorer regularly and one factor that is playing a role is the lack of add-ons that add [...]

That’s at least what Sam Allen discovered who used a software that he programmed to record memory usage of processes in Windows. He tested Safari 3.1 along with Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and Flock and discovered a huge gap between Safari and the other four browsers. His application recorded the [...]

In a recently released research paper Stefan Frei, Thomas Dübendorfer, Gunter Ollmann and Martin May analyzed Google Search Engine logs between January 2007 and June 2008 to understand the web browser threat. The research paper brought up some interesting figures including worldwide browser usage, number of users with the latest version of the browser and [...]

My Last Search is a Nirsoft application that scans the computer for information about searches that have been done in the two popular browsers Internet Explorer and Firefox. This is done by scanning Internet caches and history files of the two browsers for specific search engine queries and displaying those queries in tables. The software [...]

The Internet can be a dangerous place. Especially for those users who do not care but simply use the computer. A click on the wrong website and the computer can be infected with malicious software. Security Software tries to turn the tide in the favor of the user by blocking malicious content automatically. This works [...]

A security vulnerability came to light recently that affects Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and even Internet Explorer 8 that can be used to record keystrokes of a user even if he is switching domains. That means that a specifically prepared website can launch some Javascript that records everything the user does afterwards including [...]

GripIE is a plugin for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that integrates itself nicely in the Internet Explorer toolbar. It is assisting the user in downloading multiple media files at once from the active website. Supported are image, video and audio formats that are either embedded in or linked from the website. A click on the GripIE [...]

Cookies, or more precisely HTTP cookies, are small text files that are stored on a users computer when he visits a website that is making use of them. They can store session information, shopping cart contents, website preferences, can be used for authentication and for tracking the user. The first applications are beneficial and most [...]