Tools For Boosting (or Ditching) IE

On the heels of Mozilla's release of Firefox last week, I've been looking at some tools that you might consider if you're looking for an alternative to Internet Explorer.

Opera is always a good place to start. All along the good folks at Opera have made it their mission to develop a browser that uses significantly less memory than IE, yet doesn't sacrifice any of its important features. They've done a great job, in my view, and their latest version is well worth using. Opera works well with pages that uses lots of Javascript, and you can listen to streaming audio and watch streaming video--basically, you won't feel like you're sacrificing any of IE's features, yet because of its streamlined build you'll have a better browsing experience.

If you're not ready to get rid of IE completely, but want to improve it, you'd have to look for a long time before coming up with something better than Maxthon. We've written about this a fair amount in the past, when it was named MyIE2. The MyIE2 team is still on version 0.9.27--they say they're intending to release the full version in the near future--but I've used the program a lot on my XP system, and it's been quite stable. It has an ironclad popup blocker, and a "Mouse Gesture" feature that allows you to cut back on clicking while you're surfing the Web.

Next week I'm going to post a full list of IE Killers in the downloads section, with four to five more files--so stay tuned.