Are you a staunch Internet Explorer user and don’t have a choice to switch to Firefox or other browsers (blame: corporate policy)? Ever felt that Internet Explorer is left on the cloud with more of a decade old browsing experience? There is one simple answer with IE7Pro.

IE7Pro is a add-on for Internet Explorer 7 (yes, you can add some stuffs to IE7 as you do on Firefox). IE7Pro extends the basic experience that you get with the standard Internet Explorer 7 and brings you a whole list of rich browser experience that Firefox users tend to enjoy. Of course, the base model of open-source extensions are not there for Internet Explorer 7 but that puts you in a spot where every bit of better experience with the browser counts.

IE7Pro includes features like,

• Enhanced Tabbed Browsing – Enhances the way tabs are being handled in IE7. Gives you a lot more control in handling tabs.
• Spell Check – checks any text you enter in text boxes and alerts you to possible errors by adding a red underline to any potentially misspelled words.
• Inline Search – more of like how Firefox handles search. You can just type in a web page to start searching and navigate thru search results using the F3 key or the Enter key.
• Super Drag Drop – allows you to open new links by simply dragging and dropping the link on the page.
• Crash Recovery – automatically restores all opened pages after a crash happened. More of like Session Manager in Firefox.
• Quick Proxy Switcher – as it says a real quick proxy switcher than to deal with those “Internet Options…”
• Mouse Gesture – allows you to execute some commonly performed tasks (open or close a tab, go back, go forward, print, scrolling page etc.) by drawing a simple symbol on the screen.
• Tab History Browser – allows you to browse the tab history right from the status bar icon.
• Webpage Capturer – allows you to capture the whole web page’s content into JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG or TIFF on the fly.
• AD Blocker – blocks all forms of advertising, including Flash ads, rich media, fly-ins, slide-ins, pop-ups, pop-unders, spyware and adware ads, and messenger ads.
• Flash Block – blocks Flash plugin which at times would improve the page performance.
• Greasemonkey like User Scripts platform – allows you to enhance the page’s default behavior with extendable user scripts, more of what Greasemonkey is for Firefox.
• User Plug-ins – allows you to write custom plugins for IE7Pro. It’s like more of extending the IE7Pro experience. There is complete tutorial on how to write a plugin for IE7Pro.
• MiniDM – a handy download manager that helps if you download a lot of stuffs.

Download and install IE7Pro from the official IE7Pro web site. During installation IE7Pro will ask you to configure default settings.

I would recommend to uncheck the “Set IE7Pro Search as the default search engine” option and the “Set EasyHome as Home page” option. Uncheck those and finish the installation.

Once installed IE7Pro adds an icon like this to the status bar and will launch Internet Explorer and you can see kind of a Quick Guide page.

If you would like to read it thru to get familiar with IE7Pro go ahead and click on the links to the right to get familiar with some of IE7Pro’s capabilities. Once done, you can make use of some of IE7Pro’s features by right clicking on the icon on the status bar.

There are whole bunch of menu options that you can use to enhance the browsing experience with IE7Pro.

I hope IE7Pro brings you some enhancements/features that Firefox users tend to enjoy and I hope there are more feature sets on the work for IE7Pro. If you have any questions regarding this make sure to ask us on comments.

IE7Pro Download Link.