IE Surfgear to the rescue. The tiny program adds three functions accessible through buttons to the Microsoft Internet Explorer. Each button resolves on of the problems mentioned above. The first button automatically changes the font size of tiny text (and only of it, normal sized text will remain untouched) on a website to an average one, the next removes background colors of text on a website and the last removes background textures (including colors) that make text hardly readable.

The author was so nice to add a live demonstration on his website where you can try the buttons and see what they do. The buttons should be available right away after installing IE Surfgear, if they are not you have to customize the Internet Explorer toolbar to add them (or only some of them) to it.

Click on Tools > Toolbars > Customize to add the buttons to your toolbar if they are not displayed after installation.

Funny side note. I did find the link to the program at Shell Extension City which is in my opinion a hard to read website with their black background and grey text. Take a look at the before and after (using the buttons) screenshots of the website.

That’s a visible difference, don’t you think ?

The add-on adds an option to the right-click menu whenever you perform that operation on a mp3 file. The option to “Download directly to iTunes” appears which will download the mp3 to the My Music folder of your operating system.

Tunestor adds the mp3 to the Tunestor playlist which will be synced whenever iTunes is opened. This means that you do not have to manually sync the downloaded mp3s anymore.

I have not tried it but I suspect that Tunestor will not work when the link is not pointing directly to the mp3.

As Samer points out over at Freeware Genius this browser extension raises some (privacy) issues. It downloads music only to the My Music folder and it is not possible to change the default folder. If you don’t have much space on that drive you might be inclined to stop using – or simply not install – Tunestor.

Tunestor will ask you during installation if you want to share your downloads with their TuneStory sharing and download site. I would recommend to uncheck this option. It adds another context menu entry as well which is called Tunestory.com Hit List. Samer was not able to find out what it did but I was.

The Hit List simply loads the Tunestory website it seems. I would have suspected it to load the popular category but it currently leads to the main one instead.

Even if I wanted to I could not use Tunestor because of the limited space on my main hard drive. I think this could be a nice program for users who download lots of mp3s from websites. Everyone else is probably better of syncing files manually.

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.