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Sep 24

IE7Pro: Inline Spell Checking and Statusbar Weather

Posted in: Freeware, Internet Explorer, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on June 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

IE7Pro is the single biggest browser add-on that I’ve ever seen. We’ve previously outlined some of the features that it enhances Internet Explorer 7 with, but we thought that it was time to take another look at it. Heck, in the last 5-months it has received 7 updates, and almost every update adds at least one new feature.

Looking through the changelog these are the things that stood out to me the most:

Support for Internet Explorer 6
Greasemonkey script support, with several popular ones included such as the YouTube video downloader.
IE7Pro can update itself with just one-click.
Autofill function
Improved plug-in support: IE7Pro includes weather, Alexa/PageRank, and site information plug-ins by default. All of those display in the Statusbar as shown in the screenshot below.

And then there is the biggest feature which was just added at the beginning of June: inline spell checking! Just like in Firefox 2 you can have Internet Explorer 7 check the words you type for misspellings. If it finds that you spelled a word incorrectly it will be underlined in red:

IE7Pro

The latest version of IE7Pro added spell checker support to both Gmail and Yahoo Mail as well, which is probably the two most popular locations where people would want it. You can even add additional dictionaries to make spell checking in other languages a piece of cake.

I don’t use Internet Explorer very often, but if I did there is no way that I would use it without IE7Pro installed. It adds a lot of functionality that I feel is necessary for Web browsers to have these days, although it does still lack session restoring. I guess IE7 does have session restore capabilities built-in, but it only pops up when you go to close the browser with multiple tabs open:

IE7 Session Restore