[tip] Using IE when it's not your default browser

Firefox has been my default browser for nearly a year, but there are a few sites that I have to use that use IE specific HTML. A usual offender is corporate intranets, since they've got a captive audiance.

One solution is the Firefox IE View plugin, which added an "Always view in IE" feature in v0.87 (April 05). It pretty much works (be sure to use this release or later), but it's a little bit clunky. It starts to browse to the page, detects the domain is in the IE list, and pops up the page in IE.

A slightly quicker solution for commonly used pages is cheesy, but it works. I create a shortcut to iexplore.exe with the url as a command line argument, like so:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" "http://intranet.megacorp.com/timetracking/index.htm"

Make sure to include the quotation marks and the full path, like the example above.

I name the shortcut something short and descriptive - say "TT" for a time tracking system - and drop a copy of it into a folder that's in the environment path, like c:\windows\

Then I can bring up the page in IE with a few keystrokes: Windows-R, TT, Enter

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3 Comments

  • You could use the newest version of Netscape which allows you to change how the content is rendered i.e. you can select whether to use IE or Firefox. You can preset this on a site by site basis.

    Like you I have been using Firefox for ages now but unfortunately SharePoint doesn't like Firefox much so when I visit our SharePoint site I have told netscape to use IE rendering.

  • I just switched to Maxthon (www.maxthon.com) but since it is based off of the IE engine, it will work with anything that will work in IE... Its like a skin on steriods... I personally like the built in RSS reader...

  • nothing to do with IE, but great job on the sounds familyre site! i'm just getting into their music and thought the website was majestic.

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