IE Tab is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...

, Flock

Flock (web browser)

Flock was a web browser that specialized in providing social networking and Web 2.0 facilities built into its user interface.Earlier versions of Flock used the Gecko HTML rendering engine by Mozilla....

, Google Chrome

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...

 and SeaMonkey

SeaMonkey

SeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code...

 web browsers which allows users to view pages using the Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

 layout engine

Layout engine

A web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...

. This may be useful for viewing pages that only work in Internet Explorer (e.g., Windows Update

Windows Update

Windows Update is a service provided by Microsoft that provides updates for the Microsoft Windows operating system and its installed components, including Internet Explorer...

) without exiting the user's preferred web browser. Pages viewed through the IE Tab extension will be recorded in Internet Explorer's history, cache

Cache

In computer engineering, a cache is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster. The data that is stored within a cache might be values that have been computed earlier or duplicates of original values that are stored elsewhere...

, and so on, as if they had been viewed directly in Internet Explorer. The extension has become popular among web developer

Web developer

A web developer is a software developer or software engineer who specializes in, or is specifically engaged in, the development of World Wide Web applications, or distributed network applications that are run over HTTP from a web server to a web browser....

s, since they can display and compare their websites in the two browsers simultaneously.

Laura Blackwell of PC World wrote that the extension is also useful for die-hard Firefox fans who still keep an Internet Explorer window open "just for those holdout sites that require IE to function." The extension "makes it a little easier to reduce your IE dependency: It lets you open a Firefox browser tab that runs sites intended for IE."

History

IE Tab was originally conceived by a Taiwan

Taiwan

Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

ese medical student, Hong Jen Yee, a free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 enthusiast known as PCMan on the Internet. He first developed the plugin and provided a simple demo page; he then released it to the forums of the Taiwan Mozilla community. It caught the attention of three other Taiwanese Firefox extension developers, known online as yuoo2k, dexter, and softcup. They created an extension to facilitate the use of the plugin. The developers then started to work together. With some instructions for XPCOM

XPCOM

XPCOM is a cross-platform component model from Mozilla. It is similar to Microsoft COM and CORBA. It has multiple language bindings and IDL descriptions so programmers can plug their custom functionality into the framework and connect it with other components.-The model:XPCOM is one of the main...

 usage from European Mozilla developer Christian Biesinger, they finally integrated the plugin and the extension successfully, and formed the prototype of IE Tab. After its release on mozdev.org

Mozdev.org

mozdev.org is a website that offers free project hosting and software development tools to the Mozilla community. Many Firefox extensions are hosted on the site, but Thunderbird and SeaMonkey extensions and stand-alone Mozilla-based applications can also be found. It is free to set up a project...

 and the MozillaZine

MozillaZine

MozillaZine is an unofficial website about the Mozilla project and provides information and support about products like the Firefox browser or the Thunderbird email client....

 forum, the tool became quite popular. IE Tab was later developed for Google Chrome

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...

, based on the original IE Tab, by Blackfish Software.

Development status

The original developer, Hong Jen Yee, quit the project in early 2006 because he had become a full-time Linux user. The project is still under development by yuoo2k.

Some other groups of developers are taking over the development of IE Tab, making it compatible with Firefox 3.6+. These include the IE Tab 2 project (ietab.net) and the IE Tab Plus project (coralietab.mozdev.org). IE Tab Plus includes an "optional price comparison feature" that has been classified by users as malware

Malware

Malware, short for malicious software, consists of programming that is designed to disrupt or deny operation, gather information that leads to loss of privacy or exploitation, or gain unauthorized access to system resources, or that otherwise exhibits abusive behavior...

, but the author provides an alternate version without it.

External links

• IE Tab Multi. The most similar to the original Internet Explorer behavior.
• IE Tab 2
• IE Tab homepage
• IE Tab 2 homepage
• IE Tab