Few of my favorite IE7Pro features

Tal Shachar, which is a sort of a mentor for me, and one of the people I appreciate the most,  introduced me to IE7Pro, which he writes about on his blog.

I've been using it for quite a while now, and found a few features I really like.

Sessions' management

This is, for me, a great (if not the greatest) feature. I'm spending quite some time researching the Internet, for me, or for my clients. When I'm preparing for a lecture, or when I'm writing a post, or just trying to study something new.

Usually, I'm opening tab-after-tab of links, from search engine, or from inside an article, and so on. Resulting in an IE window with 10-20 tabs.

When I'm done searching, I just save the entire session (all the links, to all the opened tabs) with a unique name. Later, if I need, or want, to return to them, I can easily restore the entire session.

Catching a snap shot of a page

Another great feature. I'm consulting a lot about user interface, and related issues. Therefor, many of my documents and reports include screen capture of web pages. This feature makes it so much easier: instead of having a screen capture utility running, I have a screen capture inside the browser, only two clicks away.

View Selected Source

When ever I want to check a rendered HTML, I use the "view source" as a starting point. Most sites and pages, will display a long and messy HTML code; especially those who are based on some kind of content management application (i.e. MOSS 2007).

What IE7Pro offers, as a nice addition, is the option to select a part of the page and just view the "selected source". A very cool and handy feature.

IE7Pro offers another nice feature, related to that, which is to change the application being used to view the source. But that is something you can easily do with a small registry hack.

Online services

As with most IT consultants, I have a few computers I'm using. The online services on IE7Pro, makes it very easy to synchronize the bookmarks (favorites) between all of them. That alone isn't something that great, since there are many add-ons and utilities that do just that.

The nice thing about that feature, is the ability to synchronize preferences. If I'm switching computer, or just formatting, I just need to install IE7Pro, and two click later, I have my IE the way I like it.

Features I want

Since nothing is perfect, there're few items I would be happy to see...

A single click to bookmark a page. Firefox has it. It is very comfortable: you came across a page you want to remember, just click the little star on the address bar, and that's it (this is how it goes in Firefox).

Easy macro recording and playing, for repetitive tasks... All of the Office applications has it, why not IE?

If anyone knows about a utility that dose that (or how to do it in IE7Pro) I'll be happy to hear about it...