TweakIE
As its name implies, this utility won't transform IE, but TweakIE 2.5 (US$15 direct download) can customise IE's appearance, adjust some of its settings, clear out the record of your browsing, and back up crucial IE and Outlook Express files. A tabbed interface lets you change the title bar text in IE and Outlook Express; clear the history, cache, and cookies lists; disable parental controls; adjust the IE cache size; and perform miscellaneous tasks such as putting the items in the Start menu and favourites back into alphabetical order.
TweakIE's most valuable features are the ability to back up IE and Outlook Express settings, back up your full set of e-mail messages, and recover messages even after you delete them from Outlook Express's Deleted folder -- a feat possible as long as you haven't compressed your message files.
Some of TweakIE's features are available through settings buried deep within IE itself, but no other program offers so many IE-related fixes and backups in one convenient interface.
TweakIE
Company: Wizard Systems
Price: US$15, Free trial version available.
Rating: 4 Star
AI RoboForm
Tired of jumping from field to field in Web forms? Compared with IE's AutoComplete feature, which makes you start typing in each field before it pops up a list of previously entered names and addresses, AI RoboForm (free) fills in an entire form with a single click and lets you store data for multiple identities as well.
You create an identity that includes your name, address, phone number, credit card info, and up to nine custom fields -- or unlimited custom fields with the Pro version (US$29.95 direct download).
The program adds two buttons to the IE toolbar. When a form appears on a Web page, hitting the Fill Form button automatically fills in all the fields that the program can match. To switch identities before filling in a form, click on the Identities button. Similar functionality will be built into Netscape 6, but AI RoboForm is the best form-filler available for IE.
AI RoboForm
Company: Siber Systems
Price: Free download, RoboForm Pro US$29.95.
Rating: 5 Star
Afreet Site View
If you're one of those Web surfers who wants to view the directory structure of the sites you visit, then Afreet Site Viewer (free) is the add-on for you. In Microsoft Internet Explorer, Afreet uses the Explorer bar to display a hierarchical list of links on the site currently visible in the browser, as well as the hierarchy for the current browsing session. Each branch of the outline-style list can be expanded or contracted with a click. Unlike so-called "spider" software, which traces multiple levels of links to display the full structure of a site, Afreet shows you only the links on the pages you visited. Afreet Site Viewer Pro(US$10 direct) eliminates the ads shown in the free version.
Afreet Site View
Company: Afreet Software
Price: Free download, Site Viewer Pro US$10.
Rating: 3 Star
netXtract
netXtract (ad-sponsored version, free; ad-free version, US$29.95 direct download) lets you extract text from any page you visit in IE, store it in a customisable tree-structured database, and return later to the page where you found it.
You can also use netXtract to zero in on text on a page, using tabs in the Explorer bar. The knowledge base feature lets you save selected text (or a whole page) in the browser by right-clicking on selected text and choosing Save to Kbase. This feature is powerful but somewhat annoying, because you have to enter keywords about the selected text before you can save it. But this unique program is well worth trying if you want to save and retrieve data from pages packed with text.
netXtract
Company: Relevant Software
Price: Free download, ad-free version US$29.95.
Rating: 4 Star
WebWasher
With WebWasher (personal use, free; corporate, US$25) on your system, most banner ads will never appear in your browser, and cookies that report your activities are never sent to advertisers. This utility completely blocks most Web advertisements and can be fine-tuned to turn off animated images and let you control which cookies are allowed on your system. The result is faster browsing and massively reduced visual clutter.
If an ad does get through WebWasher's filters, you can right-click on the ad in IE or Netscape and add it to the list of blocked files. The program is visible only as a small icon in the taskbar tray; you can click on the icon to disable WebWasher temporarily and let ads and cookies through until you click on it again. If you prefer that the program be completely invisible, you can switch off the icon.
WebWasher operates as a proxy server, which means that all communication between your browser and the Internet is detoured through WebWasher to be filtered. A few years ago, proxy-server utilities sometimes inadvertently blocked access to the Web for users who didn't know how to configure them, but WebWasher configures itself flawlessly. A similar ad-blocking feature is one of the features in Symantec's Norton Internet Security package (which does not operate as a proxy server), but WebWasher implements ad blocking more elegantly and efficiently, and it costs nothing when used on a home machine.
WebWasher
Company: webwasher.com AG
Price: Free download, Corporate use, US$25.
Rating: 5 Star
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