PC Tonic

Internet Explorer 7 may have all the basics you would expect from a modern browser (tabs,  phishing protection, options to easily organize feeds and favourites, etc. etc.), but it still horribly lacks all those nifty, dead useful options demanded by power users. For one thing, IE doesn’t have a basic download manager as yet (not even in the upcoming 8 version, it seems!). Keyboard shortcuts aren’t well defined, crashed sessions can’t be recovered and there is simply no way to block those annoying flash advertisements that pop up at every other web page you visit.

Addressing all these shortcomings and more (than you can possibly imagine) is a tiny 2.5MB plug-in for IE 7 – IE7Pro. IE7Pro is dead easy to install, and once done it sits comfortably on your browser’s status bar as a small, blue icon.

Double click it and you instantly get a multitude of very cool and useful features to pimp up your IE!

Here are but some of the features that IE7Pro can add to your browser :

1.Add a whole lot of basic functions, like crash recovery, enhanced tabbed browsing, mouse gestures and more!

2.IE7Pro overwhelms IE’s non-existent downloading features with an adequately featured download manager (MiniDM), that can accelerate your downloads and also save them locally for future-resuming. Caution : If you’re already using some download manager like FDM or DAP, you should better disable MiniDM to avoid conflicts.

3.It adds a cool spell checker to your browser, something which has been present in Firefox and Safari since long (and coming in other browsers as well).

4.IE7Pro can block annoying Flash and AdSense advertisements that appear on many web pages (and also consume a lot of bandwidth) using it’s Ad Blocker feature. This is similar to what AdBlock Plus extension does for Firefox.   

5.Pretty much like Greasemonkey for Firefox, IE7Pro enables use of user scripts and plug-ins in IE. There is a useful list of user scripts pre-built into IE7Pro – download videos from YouTube, apply CSS skins to Gmail, notify about MySpace updates etc. Should you require more, you can always download them at http://iescripts.org . 

6.IE7Pro adds the prefetching option to IE, meaning it can render web pages faster.

7.The Auto Form Filler mimics the Wand option in Opera by automatically filling up user names, passwords and entire forms for you! And if you were just about to complete your 1500-word email when IE crashed, Text Saver will restore it for you.

I’m sure you must now be cursing yourself loud for not having tried this fantabulous piece of software before. IE7Pro doesn’t hinder the performance of IE in any way (enhances it to some extent rather), it’s aboslutely free, and it’s less than 3MB in size – there is simply NO damn reason you shouldn’t have it! And there is good news for all the beta testers of IE 8 (currently in beta 2) – IE7Pro works perfectly well with those versions as well.