10 must-see Internet Explorer 7 Addons

Microsoft tries to compete with its Windows Marketplace against the add-on dominance of Firefox. The main difference between add-ons that you find on the Marketplace and those that you find on the Mozilla website is that some Marketplace add-ons are not free.

This articles looks only at add-ons that are freely available on the marketplace website. I will mention Firefox add-ons that provide you with the same functionality if available as Firefox users may benefit from the listing as well because of it.

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

Note: Microsoft has removed the Windows Marketplace listings for the Internet Explorer add-ons. Most add-ons are no longer available. The new website over at IEGallery lists a couple of add-ons though that you may be interested in.

Additionally, Internet Explorer 7 is no longer supported by Microsoft.

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 add-on that is probably only useful if you need to use your voice to browse the Internet. No add-on 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 add-on 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 web mailers such as Gmail, hotmail and yahoo mail. Send Page by Email is the Firefox extension that has this functionality.

Advertisement