March 3rd, 2008
My 10 favorite Windows programs of all time
IE7 Pro (IE7 Pro)
Info/Download
Price: Free
System requirements: Windows XP with IE7; Windows Vista
When it comes to browsers, I’m agnostic. Sometimes I use Firefox, sometimes I use Internet Explorer 7. I used to chafe at the missing features in IE7 that I took for granted in Firefox. But that all ended a year ago when I discovered IE7 Pro.
This nifty free add-on downloads and installs quickly and instantly adds the features Microsoft forgot to include in IE7:
Crash recovery What happens if IE crashes (thank you, cursed Flash player) and you had a dozen pages open in separate tabs? With this option, you’re given a menu of all your pages so you can reopen one or all.
Tab management Open new tabs, manage existing ones, auto-refresh a tab at an interval of your choosing, and reopen a page from the tab history.
Ad blocking The default settings do a good job of uncluttering ad-heavy pages and are easily customizable. There’s also a nice Flash-blocker; you can re-enable any Flash region on a page just by clicking it.
And more… User-agent switcher, mini download manager, on-the-fly spellchecking, inline search, mouse gestures, and bookmark backups, to name just a few features.
The developers of IE7 Pro update it regularly, and their only compensation comes from donations and spiffs they get from Google when you search through their ad-supported IE7 Pro Search page. I really can’t imagine using IE7 without this add-on.
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Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 03/03/08
