Despising RTFM? Already read all this? In a rush? Download now!
Nowadays, the Web browser market is a pretty competitive one. The Gecko engine, which is pretty fast and has excellent support of W3C standards, is at the heart of Mozilla (Windows, Linux, MacOS X) and Camino (MacOS X); The KHTML library, also with excellent standards support, empowers Konqueror (Linux/KDE) and serves as ground technology for Safari's impressive performance (MacOS X).
On Windows, however, despite the availability of excellent alternative browsers such as Mozilla or Opera 7, Internet Explorer is still #1 by sheer force of numbers. The reason is simple: it is built-in, so to speak. No box with Windows pre-installed comes without IE.
Yet IE sucks. Well, not all that much. Sure, its effort towards fully respecting such crucial Web standards as XHTML 1 Strict and CSS2 have been close to nonexistant for the past few years; right, it still offers none of the features we've come to expect of "modern" browsers, such as popup blocking/filtering, advanced management of forms, passwords and cookies, or even such a simple feature as tabbed browsing. Yet it's here. So the work falls to third parties to build upon it in an effort to provide the user with all the missing niceties.
You can find many nice add-on sets for IE, among which the noteworthy freewares AvantBrowser and SlimBrowser. Still, no matter how useful those are, they are massive. It's an all-or-nothing gambit: either get it all, or get none of it. Not only that, but these are not Open Source: you don't really know what you get. If there's a bug, you rely on the authors for correction, not the whole community. It's black box. Like IE.
IEHelpers has humbler goals, in a way.
It works with small, independent plug-ins you can install as you like, composing your own set of extra features in an unobstrusive manner.
It's also OSI-certified Open Source Software, meaning you get full access to the source code, and are free to reuse it under the terms of the GNU Public Licence v2. No hidden bugs. Super-fast correction and release cycles.
And always, always the one true goal: make your browsing experience a better one.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| WSIE | Adds support for Konqueror's hailed Web Shortcuts functionality, which empowers users by letting them use customizable shortcuts in their URLs to easily access their favorite Web resources. Supports the whole of Konqueror's full-fledged expansion syntax. Perform your favorite queries (e.g. Google, IMDb, W3C, IETF, Yahoo!, PHP manual) in a snap! Comes with 50+ shortcuts "out of the box," and lets you customize it at will. |
This section is about how you can get further information on IEHelpers, and otherwise interact with the project.
| Update type | Plug-in | Details | When? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feature | WSIE | Merging capability for easy integration of (new) default shortcuts in the user's customized list. | 10/2003 |
| GUI | WSIE | Better configuration dialog. | 10/2003 |
| Plug-in | SSIE | Universal stylesheet switcher with integrated "remember chosen style" feature. | 11/2003 |
