·:[ E-Musings On Web Stuff ]:·
• • •

Once upon a time I loved a free software called MyIE. This add-in wrapper extended and enhanced the Internet Explorer (IE) browser engine. But MyIE2 wasn’t the first of its breed. That accolade goes to StileSoft’s NetCaptor that began as a free standalone plug-in piggy-backing on the IE rendering engine. Then NetCaptor decided to become advertisement-supported while also introduced a rather nasty memory leak that never seemed to be fixed! For the uninitiated memory leaks on Windows are nasty. More so on typical Windows 95/98/2000 computers with 64-128 MB of RAM. And so I very regretfully discarded it.

MyIE came out of China and subsequently morphed into MyIE2 and thence to Maxthon. MyIE also spawned GreenBrowser and AvantBrowser. And so on to Internet Explorer 7 that did what some said was Firefox (with shades of Opera). Even though it took Microsoft some five years to upgrade their venerable free browser. And even then the result remained a half-baked version that stayed many steps behind the competition both on features and functionality. Which (again) gave the browser wrapper market its second wind.

But a key area where the IE7 core scores is in terms of resource use. The IE7 browser drops from 170 MB (with 8 active tab sessions) on minimize to an amazing 1.9 MB! In comparison Firefox and Opera, even when minimized to System Tray, don’t release half as many resources for the same number of active sessions. Nor do the likes of Maxthon (1.5.x or the new 2.x Beta). I installed Maxthon 2.0.1.6526 and even with zero tabs, it used 24 MB maximized and 4.5 MB minimized to the Tray!

Matter of fact from being a Firefox, Opera and Maxthon user I’m now (almost exclusively) an IE7, Firefox and Opera fan. Why these three? Because I get better bang for available RAM with IE7. And for research, Firefox’s Scrapbook extension is incomparable. Opera’s excellent cache management lets me play my favorite Rasterwerks Phosphor FPS (first-person-shooter) [eMusings, March 19, 2006] without Shockwave rendering engine stutters and stammers

And then I chanced across IE7 Pro. This most interesting IE7 feature-extender adds enhanced tab handling including opening new tabs from searches, the address bar, Favorites and History. Also included are customizable Ad and Flash blocking. There’s also URL aliasing where you link a specific, case-sensitive keyword to a URL. You can also define custom searches using a trigger character.

It also tracks opened tabs across browsing sessions. As well as Super Drag ‘n Drop where you click on then drag a hyperlink to open in new tab. This feature defaults to opening the new tab in the background. With IE7Pro, IE7 supports mouse gestures for common tasks. As well as support for multiple proxies. And you can even change the browser user agent. Do remember this is not a web developer recommended stunt as many sites serve web content pages based on browser type. That when misused is the most common cause for web page rendering problems. There’s also Firefox SessionSaver-style crash recovery for those rare (but nonetheless annoying instances) when IE7 actually crashes.

Another really interesting enhancements is the ‘Save current tab to image’ option. This takes a snapshot of an entire web page as a PNG, JPG, GIF, TIF or BMP image. True, this is not as handy as Scrapbook text plus images option but it’s a beginning. To activate the feature, click the IE7Pro icon in the IE7 Status Bar, then choose ‘Save current tab to image’ option, select the save to location and preferred image format. That’s all you need to saves the entire page to an image.

But there’s always a small black cloud IE7Pro is still missing a Firefox-style URL complete feature that extends to .net and .org (.com is a native IE7 function triggered with Ctrl+Enter). Nor is their Function Key re-mapping or custom URL auto-complete keyboard combinations (both like the other IE wrappers offer).

IE7Pro is truly a must-have Internet Explorer plug-in. As of writing IE7Pro 9.10 was the stable release. There’s also an excellent FAQ and feature description available in the IE7Pro User Guide.

That’s it for the week. Stay safe! And I’ll have more for you soon.

This post kicks off a new series about Great, Lousy and Downright Ugly software. Luckily, there aren’t too many of the last. But sadly plenty of the middle. But the guinea pig that I like to think of myself isn’t that stupid to crash a carefully configured computer with some of the lousy stuff. It may get installed but one whiff of ‘the stupids’ and its G-O-N-E.

Dem Ugly
The NETEagle TCP Optimizer was a disaster. First it needs the .Net Framework installed. And once setup, all you get is a screen where you select the Windows OS type (Win 9x/ME; WinNT/2000/2003/XP). Followed by the connection type. Next click the OK button to optimize your connection. This lack of an advanced view to show the changes to be made decided me against continuing. NETEagle was in. And two steps later was out forever. Leaving just a screen shot

Good News
But all is not lost. You can still tweak your TCP settings with the free. And self-contained. SpeedGuide’s TCP Optimizer software. All you have to do is download and run it. It Displays the current settings, with an option to switch to optimum settings (based on IP connection speed and modem/LAN access type). There’s also a custom setting option where you can tweak individual values for MTU, RWIN, QoS and ToS/Diffserv prioritization. And before you apply the new settings, the entire list of registry-level changes is listed. With an option to backup the existing setup in case the update doesn’t do you any good.

TCP Optimizer is my favored TCP/IP configuration software. That I run on all new computers. If you’ve never used it. And do you’ll be surprised at the increase in lookup, browsing and download speed.

Totally Lousy
You read it here first (I hope). Stay A-W-A-Y from the new Ad-Aware 2007 Beta. It’s a large 12 MB download. And when installed gives you 5 days of trial1 To add insult to injury, it’s not better than any of the free anti-adware software available. Matter of fact it’s worse that its Ad-Aware 1.7 SE predecessor! This is one software I really regretted downloading. All it gets is an information link.

Best For Last
After years of struggling with a really ancient copy of Adobe Acrobat 6 Professional. I decided to practice what I preached and use freeware instead. I’m really happy with the free Foxit PDF reader. This at under 2 MB is not only easy to acquire. But its Zipped version can be extracted and run without a complicated installation process.

Of course the free Foxit PDF Reader doesn’t let you delete pages or remove security settings (even if you have the document password). And it keeps displaying a free advertisement (not visible in product screen shot) that you have to disable on a per-use basis. But overall this lightweight (resource-wise) is a heavyweight (application-wise). It’s also available for both Windows and Linux.

And in case you want more for less, a Googling reveals more free PDF readers.

Complementing your free PDF reader is the (also free) PDF Creator, a PDF printer driver with more features than Acrobat’s Distiller program! That you download and install to create PDFs from Microsoft Office documents, web pages, and any Windows application that supports a printer driver.

Interestingly you aren’t limited to PDFs. PDF Creator can also print to image formats such as PNG, JPG, TIFF, PS and EPS. Merge multiple .PS files into a single PDF. Send generated PDFs by email. Tag documents using multiple keywords for Author, computer name, user name, title, date/time, etcetera for easy classification and retrieval. And even you manage PDF document security (read, select text, edit, print).

That’s it for now. More later. Stay Safe ‘n Secure.