Search

One advance in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 was the addition of the search bar to the browser and the ability to add custom search engines. Again, this was old hat for competitors but a solid improvement for those whose organizations enforce Microsoft products. For most search tools on the Web, you could execute a search, in all capitals, for the word TEST, copy the resulting URL, and paste it into the Microsoft.com form to create a custom search tool. This function remains the same in Internet Explorer 8, the only noticeable difference being that (a) it is slightly harder to find the link to the form, which is located now at the bottom of the add-ons and accelerators page and (b) the search tools are listed by icon, not title when you click the search box.

Search from the Location Bar

I am not sure when this feature arose but it's a welcome addition to Internet Explorer 8. I was at a legal technology presentation about a month ago and heard someone proclaim that the single best reason to use Google Chrome instead of IE8 was the ability to use the location bar as the search bar. In fact, you can type a search into the IE8 browser bar and in many cases IE8 will flip the query directly to your default search engine. In some cases, it will try to turn your query into a domain name, and will return an error if the domain doesn't exist. To make sure that anything you type into your location bar is treated as a search, just type a question mark in front of it. This also works when you use your keyboard to open a url using CTRL-O. Unlike Firefox, where CTRL-L puts your cursor into the location bar and hitting TAB once puts you in the search bar, the only way to get into the IE8 location bar is with a mouse click. Hitting TAB twice puts you in the IE8 search bar. But if you are using your default search engine, you can just hit CTRL-O, type ? and then your query in order to execute a search.

Add-Ons: Toolbar Overload

There seem to be relatively few add-ons for Internet Explorer 8 and most of them seem to be full toolbars, requiring lots of screen real estate for very narrowly tailored functions. The only ones I've found that work similarly to Firefox extensions are:

• Google Toolbar for IE, which enables universal access to your Google Bookmarks, similar to the GMarks Firefox extension. I like this because I do not use local favorites or bookmarks in any browser, but load them up to either Google or Delicious
• Yahoo's Delicious toolbar, which is the same as the Firefox extension from Yahoo! Unlike most of the functions of the Google bar, you can take a few of the Delicious functions, like Tag, and add them to the universal IE toolbar, next to the home button
• Justis.com Publishing's J-Link add-on, which is similar to the Jureeka.net Firefox extension. This can be helpful for legal researchers, as you can click the J-Link button and it will scan the Web page you are reading for any legal citations. If it finds any, it will generate links to online versions of the case or statute. Jureeka covers far more jurisdictions and countries, and it is always on, not a function that has to be repeatedly executed, but J-Link is a nice first step.

I miss having the equivalents of the Zotero and GooglePreviews Firefox extensions, although the latter is now monetizing their service. I am trying out Iterasi for its limited Web capture functionality, so we'll see how that goes. I have Microsoft Onenote on my home computer, and use the Send to Onenote function for that, which is a nice way to grab content and saves them into a Onenote book.

Add-Ons: Accelerators

One Internet Explorer 8 innovation, if you want to call it that, is the accelerator. It creates a right click menu entry that you can access when you highlight text on a Web page. Instead of cutting and pasting the text into a new site or service, you can select a pre-installed accelerator and send the text directly to the service. For example, I have created a basic one for CanLII, so that you can highlight text and execute a full database search on CanLII. It saves the time of copying the text, opening a new tab on CanLII and searching, or even cutting and pasting the search into my custom CanLII search on my search bar.

The accelerators seem relatively weak as a resource, although they could be nice shortcuts for certain regularly used sites. They really don't provide the sort of scope that most Firefox extensions create for researchers.

Tab Recovery

One of the hallmark Google Chrome features is how it separates each tab into a separate process, so if one tab's content crashes, the whole browser continues to work. IE8 offers similar functionality, although you can turn it off in your Internet Options. The concept is a good one and I have had some success with it saving my overall browsing experience when a particular page fails. However, I have had a more recent experience - and seen numerous online postings for people with the same issue - where the closing of the browser or any given tab will generate the Windows XP equivalent of a General Protection Failure, an error message that has no information to explain what has happened. Sometimes this crashes the whole browser, sometimes it just crashes the tab you are on, and sometimes it doesn't have any impact since you were closing the tab anyway.

"I knew Firefox, and you're no Firefox"

All of this to say that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 is still not a direct competitor to Mozilla's Firefox, because the latter's extendability is what sets it apart. Like the Apple iPhone, people seem more able and willing to develop apps for Firefox than Microsoft.  The reality is that most corporations will be providing Microsoft Internet Explore in some form, no matter how powerful Firefox becomes, and the better it is at providing a high quality research experience, the better for all lawyers.