Talkings of a Tyrant

One of the biggest problems with Mozilla Firefox has been incompatible websites.

Or, rather, websites designed only for Internet Explorer. Firefox can’t render sites designed with Microsoft, specifically ActiveX, in mind. This isn’t Firefox’s fault, but rather the lazy web developer’s/web programmer’s/web master’s fault.

Previously, there was no way around this, other than opening up Internet Explorer (IE) and viewing the site from there. No longer.

IE Tab embeds IE into Firefox at your command to allow you to view the website as it would be viewed in Internet Explorer. The browser is the same, the buttons, the tabs, and the menus are all the same, except for what is inside the tab. Inside the tab, the website is displayed exactly how it would be if you were viewing in in Internet Explorer.

You can easily switch between viewing the site in Firefox and IE at will. Just click on the Firefox symbol on the status bar, and you can switch back and forth. You can also create a list of sites to always view in IE Tab, so your favorite/hated bank’s website always works fine.

One downside is that any extension that affect the web page (Adblock, PasswordMaker, Aggregate Yahoo! and Google, and anything from a context menu) won’t work in IETab. Ads still show up, your context menu (right click menu) is IE’s context menu, and PasswordMaker does nothing (you have to copy to clipboard and paste). This is perfectly understandable, as IE is not Firefox.

Ideally, this extension wouldn’t be used that much (unless you liked IE more and just use Firefox for the menus and toolbars). However, it is still useful for those renegade sites that refuse to make their sites conform to standards, and to web developers who want to see how much IE butchers their beautiful site. This extension is highly useful as a backup to what could be a tricky situation.

It is also interesting to easily see how different sites are between Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Download IE Tab (Windows only)
IE Tab Website
Get Firefox!