phil ringnalda

The IE View extension for Firefox is a delight, giving you a right-click item to open either a link or the current page in Internet Explorer. It’s wonderfully handy for IE-only pages, or pages that look so horrible that you wonder whether they were designed only for IE, or just don’t work at all, and (when you remember) for checking to see that your own stuff is at least readable in IE. But, then there’s a problem. You’re over there in IE, and you see a link you want to follow, but you can’t open it in a new tab, because… you’re in IE.

Enter FirefoxView. In a delightfully twisted way, it’s a Firefox extension which, when installed, installs context-menu items in Internet Explorer to open pages and links back into Firefox. I’m just heartbroken that I missed the 0.1 release, when it was a Firefox extension consisting of a VBScript that did the dirty work with IE (apparently Norton Antivirus didn’t approve of it, so now it’s a little bitty exe, source included). Still, it’s a nice counterbalance to the reverse-twisty pref-setter Scoble linked to the other day, that uses a .NET app to set a bunch of Firefox prefs that you can set by just typing about:config in the address bar, or include in your user.js, or that could have been wrapped in a little Firefox extension.