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Polishing the Chrome

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My name is Mark Harris, and I am the Program Manager driving extensibility in IE7.   With the creation of www.ieaddons.com we have a rich set of 3rd party add-ons, and we are committed to improving this resource over time.  Most users are familiar with toolbars, but many don’t realize the breadth of the add-ons available for Internet Explorer.

Personalize Your Ride

I rented a Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200C this past weekend (hold the mid-life crisis jokes).  There are a huge number of accessories available for the bike:  custom handlebars, special seats, and (of course) louder mufflers.  These accessories let riders personalize their riding experience.  In a similar way, Internet Explorer Add-Ons provide users with a way to personalize their browsing experience.

For example, many of us have difficulty with spelling.  Enter IESpell: the spell-checker for the web.  It’s a free download for non-commercial use, and spell-checks any text typed into a form.  IESpell will also look up word definitions and works with several language dictionaries.  Right-click on any word in a page, and IESpell will get you the definition. 

Another customized feature is navigation with mouse gestures.  There is a well-put-together add-on (with source!) for Internet Explorer that adds mouse gestures to the browser frame.  With this add-on you can go forward, back, and even open tabs depending on how you move the mouse.  Mouse gestures are not for everyone – but for those who like it, the add-on makes for an even more personal browsing experience.

On the Super-Highway

Another group of add-ons are tied directly to specific web services.  Sites like Windows Live and  StumbleUpon offer add-ons for Internet Explorer so you can enjoy their services while browsing the Internet. 

The Windows Live toolbar is tied in with the Live.com web services.  It lets you access weather, stock quotes, maps, and Wikipedia searches at the touch of a button from your browser session.  It even lets you keep a copy of your Favorites on the Internet, for easy access from any computer.  The toolbar ties in cleanly with Windows Live services, as if it were a part of the browser all along.

StumbleUpon is a social networking service for web site recommendations and reviews.  Their toolbar tracks your likes and dislikes and recommends web sites that you might enjoy.  It uses calls to their back-end web service to provide this functionality from any Internet Explorer session.  Using the toolbar, they integrate the components of their web site with Internet Explorer as if they were  native to Internet Explorer.

The add-ons mentioned here are just a few of the hundreds available for IE7.  New add-ons are being submitted to www.ieaddons.com every day.  There is no way one blog post could showcase all of our favorite add-ons that are available for IE7, so you will be hearing more from us on this subject.  Until then, have fun customizing your Internet experience, and share your favorite add-ons below. 

Mark Harris
Lead Program Manager

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    Remove me from your addresses.  I am getting too many messages about the same things.

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    Now that IE7 catches up with Firefox, the huge amount of extensions for Firefox is the #1 advantage that Firefox still has over IE.

    However, there are also many fantastic IE add-ons-unfortunately, most of then quite unknown. My favorite is Web Research Pro, a tool to capture and annotate research results from within IE (www.macropool.com).

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    Ugh, this sounds like marketing material garbage, it's painful to read.

    Downloading addons for IE7 is nothing like changing parts on a bike, you can't actually modify anything in IE7, all you can do is add more potential spyware.

    It also sounds like you copied a Firefox or Opera article and changed the browser name to IE7 and extentions/widgets to "addons".

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    That sure did sound like an addy.

    Anthony
    www.cyberneticos.com

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    I also think that while IE7 is going to be much better than it ever has been before, Firefox will always be better because of their frequent release schedule.  

    It's like Mac OS X, when they release an OS, they immediately start planning the next one.  Mozilla does that with Firefox and therefore new Firefox versions come out frequently.  

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    Wilks -- are you implying the IE team is NOT planning the next version?  I remember reading that they are already working on the next two versions of IE.

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    > I'm interested to know why (it seems apparent
    > that) FireFox users are the FIRST to know about
    > updates to this blog

    It may be thanks to the powerful RSS integration and addons that are available for Firefox. But don't worry, if this post is right, trolls using IE will be as fast soon enough.

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    @SicknTired: No need to stoke the flames-- there are lots of passionate folks who read this blog.  :-)

    Our comments contain a lot of criticism, some warranted, and some not.  We're glad to see the feedback, particularly when there's something actionable (e.g. unhappiness over the name IE7+ for Vista http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/08/04/688899.aspx)

    (And for what it's worth, I've seen plenty of great feedback from PatriotB, so please aim that flamethrower with care. :-)

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    Not wanting to troll or anything, but as a web developer I'm much more interested in web standards than chrome. Please get the core right - finish implementing CSS1, implement more of CSS2 and maybe some of CSS3, then I'll be interested in "chrome"

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    I still hope in future releases it takes much less time to initially load IE when I double click it's icon on my desktop. I'd like my homepage to pop up a lot faster. Speed all around would be nice. Otherwise, I love IE7.

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    ----
    Addons at ieaddons.com are not vetted by Microsoft. The IEAddons.com model is similar to www.download.com, where the uploader must agree to certain terms and conditions (e.g. may not contain spyware) before posting.  If there's a problem, we will investigate and remove.  Users can vote on extensions and leave comments for other users.  As you can see in the case you've mentioned, there are several negative reviews for this product.
    ----
    Does someone at microsoft actually bother to read the reviews, and determine wether they are correct and thus remove malicious software?

    I headed for ieaddons.com, click "design" and then headed for "CGToolbar" - first hit, and it's spyware. The comment there have been there for over a month, indicating it's spyware, yet it remains promoted by microsoft as a add-on for IE.
    How can this happen?

    On another note, improving IE7's rendering engine and standards support would prove far more usefull for me. Making extentions/add-on's as easy to create as with firefox, would be a great idea as well.

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    Are there any addons that force ie to respect web standards?

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    I understood the final release of IE 7 was supposed to come out this week, where is it?

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    Thanks for the tip about IESpell. It's going to be very handy for our customer support team.

    What we're lacking is a serious amount of example code. We need Microsoft to provide some proper .NET example solutions for different toolbar features. We need Microsoft to provide a decent solution to debugging and testing them.

    Until this happens it's too hard for most developers to bother.

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    @EricLaw
    This site seems to show a lot of bugs still left in IE7 rendering for supported CSS items in IE7.
    http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_css.php
    It is not so much the red item which are not supported in IE7 as we already understand that not all of CSS will be supported. However the tables also show a lot of yellow items that are showing incomplete support for CSS 2.1 for items IE7 should really support so can be considered bugs. When hovering over the yellow cells the incomplete support is explained so it is quite handy to see what support is missing still from IE7.
    These tables seems also the basis for a slashdotted article about IE7 only supporting 54% of CSS 2.1 properties (a fairly dismal score to say the least)

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    How can programm that can invoke DOS attack on user's system BY DESIGN can be called browser?

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    "IE is rapidly going getting down to the 50% market share, where suddenly you have to worry about what users are actually asking for, instead of what you think they need."

    1. http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/July/browser.php
    http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2005/July/browser.php
    1% over 1 year equals rapid?
    2. I don't think you can imagine the amount of money Microsoft puts in usability testing, with good results. Most of these things you would never notice simply because of how natural things can be in the user interface. I'm pretty sure that they already cater to what their users want. Why else do you think that it takes so long to release updates or make any large scale changes? Their users want compatibility, not fancy plugins.

    At least IE7 is not IE6 with a few small features that few people want/use and hardly any updates to warrent a new version, ex: Firefox 2. Firefox 2 is one step closer in Browser War II as it was in Browser War I.

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    @Aedrin You lost the point.
    How can you justify that IE developement stopped for many-years?

    And what we see now is rust covered with chrome. Now when IE7 is layout and feature complete they're polishing this thin layer of chrome, carefully trying not to break it to dust.

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    when i right click on a link to download it, "save target as" is not a selectable option...

    why?

    how is that helpful?

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    I didn't comment on the stagnation in development for IE6. I don't work at Microsoft so I can't give you a reason - nor justification - for any lack of updates during all that time.

    I think one of the reasons is that for quite some time there was no reason to release a new version. Besides security related issues of course, which can be fixed with minor updates.

    Like I said, I can't and don't provide a justification, but in my opinion it wasn't this evil scheme that many portray it to be. All large companies have some form of "corruption" due to several unavoidable factors. It is easy to paint a grim picture for a large public company such as Microsoft, but I believe that you can find similar situations in other companies as well.

    Electronic Arts anyone?

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    Very great news that i've been waiting for from such a very long time
    but the question is there is an available sdk to develop such add-ons? and if not where it's gonna be realeased? and where to find a how-to make such great add-ons?

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    SicknTired - definitely don't aim the flamethrower at me.  I'm not a Firefox fan.  I don't use Firefox on my main computer; I have it installed on a secondary computer for the sole purpose of testing my web site in Firefox.

    I am a definitely a fan of IE -- I have developed Windows apps that do awesome things based on IE technologies.  I support the team and their efforts going forward.

    That said, I don't hesitate to tell the team when they're doing something boneheaded (like the 7+ fiasco).  But surely my post above is not an example of that.

    Many of my comments are correcting falsehoods and misconceptions that other people post in the comments.

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

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    August 10, 2006
    I think it is good.(http://www.beijingxiezilou.com)if you are interesting,p0lease click this website.

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    August 10, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2006
    @Fduch
    I can't understand why someone won't develope code faster and better when having a gadgetgram singing to him or her. It must be inspiring !!!
    ;-)

  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2006
    The spell checker addon is pretty good, but vista should include a common spell checker/dictionary/thesaurus application that can be used to spell check anything, and ties in to the library for office and speech recognition so i do not have to keep adding words to each one like my name which it usually says is mispelled Kemp, it thinks its camp cramp kemo, i have to add it to this spell checker, office spell checker and speech recognition spell checker-infuriating

  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2006
    The comment has been removed

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    August 11, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2006
    My opinion is that MS doesn't was add-ons/extensions to be safe.
    They presented the safe/unsafe to the developers and still
    Not only IE enables using unsafe controls by default. But it doesn't allow writing safe managed code for IE.

    The "examples" of developing managed IE addons are nothing. Thay just show that you CAN write managed extensions that are rather safe. There is no way to enforce it, so it's meaningless.

    That's like putting a big label in IE that says "Please don't overflow our buffers. There are examples of how not to overflow buffers at http://bla.bla"

  • Anonymous
    August 15, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 15, 2006
    Ough, remove those ugly "javascript:__doPostBack(...);" next-page-buttons from ieaddons.com!

  • Anonymous
    August 16, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 16, 2006
    @cooperpx: Good feedback.  We're working to do better, and this post is the very beginning of our efforts to highlight the best stuff.

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    Hi,

    I must first congratulate you on your great job with the product. I apologize for this posting in a random area.  I need your help..

    IE7's Popup blocker is broken,  It was working perfectly until recenlty.  Windows Defender spyware does not detect any problems.  

    Basically I turn on the Popup blocker, something turns it off ( the Popup allowed icon shows up)... however if I go to tools and check the popup blocker it appears to be on.. because the only option i have is "turn off popup blocker".


    I'm getting swamped, someone figured out how to break your popup blocker.  I checked online and no one else seems to have reported a problem with IE7's Beta2/3's popup blocker?

    Could you guy's looks into this...  this could turn out to be a big issue for the user community.  

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2006
    IE7 need a plug in like http://urandom.ca/nosquint/


    nosquint lets you save the size the text on each web site. So like lets say you like viewing microsoft.com with "Medium" and maybe you like viewing yahoo in "Larger" with this tool everytime you go to those site each will remember the text size.

    IE needs something like this!

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    August 25, 2006

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    October 15, 2007
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