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Plugin Lets Users Turn IE into Firefox

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the imitation-is-the-highest-form-of-flattery dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There is a new plugin available for IE that can make Internet Explorer resemble Firefox by adding tabbed browsing capabilities and an integrated search box. Moreover, the plugin improves IE's privacy and security by integrating a firewall designed to block out Internet exploits, phishing sites, spammers, spyware and worms, with a special HTTP filter that removes private data, and an anti-spyware tool that can identify and remove all pests in less then 10 seconds"

6 of 542 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wrong Way by locokamil · · Score: 5, Informative

    Try Maxthon.

    It's not half bad... and it can be configured to use either the IE or Gecko engine (which, unless I'm completely mistaken, is at the heart of Firefox).

  2. Re:Wrong Way by iammaxus · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oops, wrong link from Google. This is what you want: http://www.firefoxie.net/

  3. Merry Christmas by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ho ho ho!

    http://www.websitepromotion.ws/firefoxie/

  4. Full mirror of article by winkydink · · Score: 4, Informative

    here

    It wasn't obvious to me if you needed to be admin to install. If so, it kind of blows the argument of giving corporate types who are locked to IE an alternative.

    --

    "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey

  5. OK, have installed it. Report time: by Plug · · Score: 4, Informative

    There appears to be nothing in the EULA that makes it claim to be spyware/adware.

    It's heavily tied in with Ask Jeeves; it comes bundled with their desktop search, and you can't change the search button to go anywhere else.

    It comes with a desktop firewall, spyware cleaner and privacy shredder (cookie/temp files deleter) but I'll leave someone with a clean VM image to try those things on thankyou!

    While it would be nice to have tabs and a search box in IE, those are not the features of Firefox that make me use it. If you did something like "block ActiveX in IE", you'd get close, but then all those things that require IE wouldn't work.

    The adblocker works. It displays boxes with "Ad blocked" rather than no ad at all, and lets you show them by clicking on them.

    I look after a lot of people who need to keep using IE for various sites, but I still think that Firefox for general browsing and icons on the desktop for broken sites is the best option.

    Hats off to the Foxie people though; it's not OSS and it's likely to be funded/sponsored by a search engine, but will be interesting to see if it gets better. It might be worth throwing on the PCs of people who need to use IE for regular browsing.

  6. Re:Maxthon ain't half bad... by MixPix · · Score: 4, Informative

    Are you talking about the close button on the tab bar? Maxthon does have that. Actually it has "close tab" and a "close all tabs" button. (Right click the maxthon window and enable the System Bar)

    Or you can just double click a tab to close it. That's a big seller for me. I hate having to right click just to close a tab.

    Maxthon also has the ability to open the last page that was viewed or if the brower crashes you can resume all of the paegs your were looking at!

    Just a question. Why not turn off active X and scripts if you want IE to be more secure??