Firefox is a great browser that has become quite popular in the face of almost no-contest competition with Internet Explorer 6. Enhanced security, tabbed browsing and a great print engine are just a few of the components in Firefox that help to make it a much more attractive browser with which to surf the web. (n.b. Internet Explorer 7 incorporates many of the features Firefox brought to users' attention, but a review of IE7 is for another posting and we applaud the Mozilla Foundation for forcing Microsoft to up its game.) In spite of Firefox's popularity, and because of the long-term ubiquity of Internet Explorer, there are a number of sites that simply work better in, or require, Microsoft's elder browser — not surprisingly, MSN and Microsoft.com are among these sites.

To solve this problem, some braniac, by the name of Paul Roub, created IE View, a plug-in for Firefox with which users can tell Firefox to open links in IE and can have Firefox always open certain sites in IE. This is pretty darn useful if you frequent such sites.

For example, say you are browsing in Firefox and google some entry that has a link to a MSN site. Using IE View, you right click on that link and you get a menu that at the bottom says Open Target Link in IE. Select this, and boom you're page will open in IE.

Open Link in IE

Now, say you're busy going to Microsoft.com frequently and you just want Firefox to always open everything within that domain in Internet Explorer. The IE View plugin installs an option under the Tools menu.

Always View in IE

Pretty slick. This functionality reminds me a little of the different tools, such as MacLink, that Macintosh users had to emply to be more compatible with Microsoft Windows.