Chris Ruppel » IE Tab: View IE-Rendered pages in Firefox

The world rejoices as a Mozilla Firefox extension, IE Tab, has been released that allows users to view content in either the Gecko or Internet Explorer engine. This functionality has been a part of Netscape 8 for some time, so it's not ground-breaking, but still, I now have a way to test both IE 6 and 7 on the same machine! Windows Update even runs properly in Firefox via this extension. It can be set to render certain sites with the IE engine automatically. How cool is that?

It adds a contextual menu item so you can right click a link to open up a new tab of IE-rendered content. It also adds a browser icon to the status bar, so the little Firefox icon in the status bar can be clicked, which reloads the page in IE mode and switches the icon to the blue E. You'll always know which engine you're viewing in. If only it worked for OS X... Also a quick test shows that Chris Pederick's Web Developer Extension does not function with the IE engine. I'm sure there's an obvious reason for this but I didn't feel like investigating :) ¤

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