IE Tab for Firefox

IE Tab for Firefox

We don’t like Internet Explorer, but we keep it around, because every now and then we encounter some dinosaur of a Web site that can’t be viewed without it. If you find yourself doing the same thing even though Firefox is your browser of choice, try IE Tab for Firefox. This clever extension lets you open IE-only Web sites within Firefox. It’s a brilliant solution to the problem of switching back and forth between two different browsers.

IE Tab for Firefox installed easily and was ready for action after we restarted the browser. In order to find fodder for testing the extension we consulted a Web page titled “Sites that Make Firefox Sad,” which provided us with a lengthy list of sites that are still demanding the use of Internet Explorer. Sure enough, many of the sites failed to load properly in Firefox and gave us error messages informing us that Internet Explorer was required. We had only to open the IE Tab options menu, add the site to the extension’s filter, and reload the page; everything worked as expected. IE Tab for Firefox also has a context menu option that lets you launch IE and load the current page, which worked fine; unfortunately, the option to switch rendering engines in the context menu didn’t seem to do anything. Still, IE Tab for Firefox is great if you have a few particular Web sites that you frequently visit and have to switch to IE for, and it works well enough at handling the occasional new site you might stumble upon, if in a slightly roundabout way. The extension’s Support for Adblock Plus is a nice touch, too.

IE Tab for Firefox installs and uninstalls without issues.