An area in which Opera is far superior to Internet Explorer as a web browser is crash recovery. Internet Explorer, even in version 7.0, does not provide any crash recovery features. In Opera, should the browser or system crash, when you reopen the browser, you can go back to exactly where you were prior to the crash. You can have all of your tabs reopened and even move backwards through the prior URLs you visited in each tab. In contrast, Internet Explorer offers no crash recovery features. Since I've often encountered probelms with Internet Explorer crashing or hanging, I find the lack of any crash recovery features in the browser to be a major drawback to using Internet Explorer.
So, I decided to look for an add-on that might add similar functionality for Internet Explorer. I found a free add-on, IE7Pro, that offers that functionality as well as other enhancements for Internet Explorer. The developer states "IE7Pro includes Tabbed Browsing Management, AD Blocker, Flash Block, Super Drag Drop, Crash Recovery, Proxy Switcher, Mouse Gesture, Tab History Browser, Inline Search, User Agent Switcher, Webpage Capturer, Greasemonkey like User Scripts platform, User Plug-ins and many more power packed features. You can customize not just internet Explorer, but even your favorite web site according to your need and taste using IE7Pro."
During the installation, which uses a Nullsoft Install System v2.33 installation program, you are given the option to select default settings, which are shown below:
Please select default settings: [x] Enable ADblock [ ] Enable Userscripts [ ] Enable Plugins [X] Enable Spelling Checker [ ] Set EasyHome as Homepage
At the end of the installation, you are requested to set the default search engine to be IEPro's Google based search, to help finance further development of the software, but you don't have to do so. Selecting that option is certainly a small measure that you can take to make continued development of the software possible.
To simulate a system crash, I powered off the system. When I restarted the system and opened Internet Explorer, I saw a "Crash Recovery" window stating "Your last session crashed, Please review and open last URLs. All of the Internet Explorer 7 tabs I had open previously were listed and checked to be reopened. I could deselect tabs I didn't want reopened, if I wished. There were also Select All and Select None buttons. I chose to reopen all of the tabs I had open previously. Unfortunately, unlike Opera's crash recovery feature, I couldn't click on the backwards arrow button in Internet Explorer to view my history of previously visited sites in any tab. So, IE7Pro definitely offered an improvement over the total lack of crash recovery features in Internet Explorer, but also falls far short of the built-in crash recovery features of Opera.
| IE7Pro.com |
| MoonPoint (may not be the most current version) |
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