In this article let’s see how you can make use of add-ons in Internet Explorer 8, find custom add-ons, how to manage them and also how to diagnose issues with it.

According to Wikipedia,

An add-on is an optional computer hardware or software component that, if installed, significantly supplements or enhances the functionality of the original unit.

Add-ons (similar to plug-ins) certainly enhances the core functionality of Internet Explorer 8. IE8 comes with some default add-ons like Accelerators and Web Slices and you can also add custom accelerators that you see fit.

Accelerators

Accelerators, as its name implies, helps you accelerate some of the common actions that you take when you select a text in a web page. It does that by showing a little icon as soon as you select a text in a web page and when you roll your mouse over the icon shows you a context menu with some of the common actions that you can take with the selected text.

Web Slices

Web Slices allows you to add a piece of a web page to your Favorites Bar and helps you keep an eye on the updates to that portion of the web page. It is a convenient way of keeping track of tidbits of web page content.

Custom Accelerators

Even though Internet Explorer 8 comes with some default accelerators (as you can see above) you can add custom accelerators from IEAddons. Apart from accelerators you can also find other add-ons such as web slices, visual searches and plug-ins at IEAddons.com.

IEAddons Gallery might not be as comprehensive as Firefox Add-ons gallery but it still has a huge collection of custom add-ons on these categories,

• Blogging
• Bookmarks
• Dictionaries and References
• Email
• Finance
• Mapping
• Music
• News
• Photos and Videos
• Search
• Sharing
• Shopping
• Social Networking
• Toolbars
• Translation
• Travel
• Weather
• Other

Manage Add-ons

As with any good thing comes a bad thing, it’s quite easy to keep adding all these add-ons which then would become an overhead to manage. Internet Explorer 8 provides a way to manage these add-ons.

Click on the “Tools” menu and then click on the “Manage Add-ons” option. The dialog that pops-up displays quite a lot of information about the available add-ons. The list of add-ons it displays include,

• Toolbars and Extensions
• Search Providers
• Accelerators
• InPrivate Filtering

You can select the add-on from the list to see more information about the add-on and also you can enable or disable add-ons using the above dialog.

Diagnose Add-on Issues

Once you start adding more and more add-ons it could possibly slow down Internet Explorer or can sometime give so much trouble even launching it. When you run into a scenario like that you can run Internet Explorer without add-ons (by disabling all add-ons).

You can create an IE shortcut with a command line switch of “-extoff” that will disable all installed add-ons when launching Internet Explorer.

Locate “Internet Explorer” item on your Start > All Programs menu and right-click on it to get to the Properties dialog. On the Target box where you see the path to “iexplore.exe” add an empty space and then append “-extoff” to the end. Hit the OK button to dismiss the dialog and from now on when you launch Internet Explorer it will launch without add-ons.

If you are not feeling comfortable doing it this way and if you know how to create an Internet Explorer shortcut on your desktop you can set “-extoff” on the shortcut’s Properties dialog. With this way you leave the primary Internet Explorer shortcut as it is and you can use the extension-less shortcut if you want to diagnose issues with IE.

If you don’t like to keep these shortcuts adjusted you can also just type-in “iexplore -extoff” at the “Search Programs and Files” box at the Start menu.

Use whatever way you prefer to launch Internet Explorer without the add-ons and you’ll gain access to the bare-bones IE that you can use to diagnose the misbehaving add-on. You can start enabling one add-on at a time to identify the problem add-on and can then decisively remove the problem add-on.

Conclusion

Internet Explorer add-ons surely adds value to the browser, no doubt about it. You could feel the usefulness of them once you really start to leverage them in your day-to-day browsing. Along with the tools to manage and diagnose issues with the add-ons, on top of the add-on marketplace at IEAdddons.com, I think Internet Explorer add-ons are something you definitely want to give it a try.

If you find any other use of it or if you find any issues IE add-ons in general please share with us on comments.