IE Tab is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox, Flock and SeaMonkey web browsers. IE Tab allows users to view pages using the Internet Explorer rendering engine from within Firefox. This may be useful for viewing pages that only work in Internet Explorer (e.g. Windows Update) without exiting Firefox. Pages viewed through the IE Tab extension will be recorded in Internet Explorer's history, cache, and so on, as if they had been viewed directly in Internet Explorer. It appears to function by calling the installed version of Internet Explorer on the user's computer, and then running the output within a tab in Firefox.

The extension has become popular among web developers, since they can display and compare their websites in the two browsers simultaneously.

IE Tab will install on computers running Linux or Mac OS, but will only show a blank screen with the URL undefined. However, the Windows version of Firefox installed on Linux with Wine will successfully run IE Tab.

Brief history

IE Tab was originally conceived by a Taiwanese medical student, Hong Jen Yee, a free software enthusiast known as PCMan on the internet. He first developed the plugin and provided a simple demo page, and then released it to the forum of Taiwan Mozilla community. It caught the attention of three other Taiwanese Firefox extension developers, known online as yuoo2k, dexter, and softcup. They created an extension to facilitate the use of that plugin. The developers then started to work together. With some instructions for XPCOM usage from Australian Mozilla developer Christian Biesinger, they finally integrated the plugin and the extension successfully, and formed the prototype of IE Tab. After its release on mozdev.org and the MozillaZine forum, the tool became quite popular.

Current status

The original developer, Hong Jen Yee, quit the project in early 2006 due to personal reasons. The project is still under development by yuoo2k.

External links

• Official homepage
• Mozilla Addons Page

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