Twelve Smart Firefox and Internet Explorer Add-Ons

I can’t get enough of the handy-dandy freebies that clump onto Firefox and make the browsers smarter and easier to use.

Desktop Shortcut Remember how you have “Create Shortcut” on Internet Explorer’s right-click context menu? Now you've also got it in Firefox with deskCut.

Back Up Firefox Xmarks syncs your favorites in the cloud and lets you retrieve them from anywhere. So if you’re on the road, you’ll always have access to your favorites. While you’re adding add-ons, grab a copy of Firefox Environment Backup Extension to save a copy of your profile, extensions, themes, preferences, cookies, user names, and passwords.

Download and Run Remember the Internet Explorer Run option? Now that you’ve switched to Firefox, you’ll need OpenDownload to the same thing.

I don’t know why, but developers aren’t nearly as interested in creating add-ons for Internet Explorer. It’s probably because they use IE only when they have to — or it could be that Internet Explorer 8 is notorious for becoming unstable when too many add-ons are installed.

If you have trouble with any Internet Explorer add-on, Microsoft has two spots to give you a helping hand. The first explains how browser add-ons can screw up your computing experience and gives you instructions for disabling them. Okay, no, the Microsoft folks don’t use my descriptive language, but that’s essentially what they’ve said. The other page supplies a more comprehensive FAQ about add-ons.

What Xmarks does

Back Up Internet Explorer BackRex Internet Explorer Backup does what Xmarks does, but backs up favorites locally, on your hard drive. BackRex also stores IE’s security zones, cookies, history, and any other customized settings. I’d use BackRex as well as Xmarks, just for the extra stuff it saves.

Max Out If you’re willing to give up on Internet Explorer, try Maxthon. It’s a browser that uses Internet Explorer’s core engine, but its feature set far surpasses IE and gets close to what Firefox offers.

That’s it. Really. I searched — lots — and couldn’t find any other cool tools. And I even looked on Microsoft’s Add-ons Gallery, an embarrassingly boring array of mostly toolbars and search engines. That’s too bad, too, because every time I use Internet Explorer, I can’t imagine why Microsoft would maintain its lameness.