I've released IE View 1.4.5.1 for the sole purpose of having a new version number, explicitly marked as Firefox 3.6-compatible both internally and at addons.mozilla.org. It's waiting for approval right now, so in the meantime head to the IE View Home Page to grab the latest.

IE View 1.4.3 isn't available via the standard auto-update channel yet, but you can get it from the IE View download page.

Nothing major, but a Vietnamese translation has been added, and it's marked as Firefox 3.5-compatible (which it already was, just hadn't declared itself).

The latest version is, as ever, available at ieview.mozdev.org

Oops.

If you use IE View, you’ve probably long since received the update automatically, but you might not have noticed the main change it brought — a long-standing feature request was finally fulfilled: you can right-click on a tab to open it in IE, rather than clicking somewhere in the page, on a link, etc. I never quite understood why so many people wanted this, but now that it’s there I use it all the time. It’s the “Open in Internet Explorer” link here:

So there’s that. I feel better now.

IE View actually got a bit worse with the advent of Firefox 3. Previously, we’d hooked into the Bookmarks menu so that — when a bookmarked page was in the “always view in IE” list — clicking on that bookmark would launch IE immediately, with no extra steps.

Firefox 3 uses a completely new bookmarks/history/etc., and that integration no longer worked. You’d click a bookmark, Firefox would start to load the page, IE View would notice, launch IE, and leave behind a “this page was reloaded” placeholder in Firefox. Works, but irritating.

So I’m fixing that. Or, hopefully, have already done so — but I don’t want to release without testing beyond my own machines.

So if you have a moment, especially if you’re seeing this behavior and would like it to go away, please try out the IE View version attached to this bug, and let me know how it goes.

There’s a fix that solves an installation problem for a small set of users, and several updated translations.

But the main change is that I’ve added an “Open in Internet Explorer” to the context (right-click) menu for bookmarks. So right-click a bookmark, either in the Bookmarks menu or in the Bookmark Toolbar, and you have the option of launching that page in IE.

Note that this works in Firefox 3 (and higher) only.

On the one hand, I’m happy to have this feature, and a lot of users are as well. On the other hand, the bug requesting this has been open since November 2003. Not exactly the fastest response ever — although in my defense, doing this under Firefox 2 would have taken the kind of surgery that tends to interfere with other extensions. It’s always been a goal to keep IE View very well-behaved and unobtrusive.

Ah, the joys of spare-time coding.

This fixes the gIeviewBundle error when certain other extensions are installed; if you're seeing that error message you'll want to grab this right away.

A test build working around this problem is attached to the bug in Bugzilla. If all goes well, this will be released as v1.3.7 within a day.

It's that "certain users" part that's the problem. More specifically, I'm not one of them, under various Firefox installation on Vista, XP, etc. — I can't reproduce the problem.

If you look at the bug (Bug 18727: gIeviewBundle error in 1.3.6), you'll see that the problem is a "TypeError: gIeviewBundle has no properties" error dialog when right-clicking a link and asking for it to be opened in IE.

You'll also see that I need someone (preferably more than one person) with this problem to:

1. Try it in a clean Firefox profile to see if the behavior changes
2. Tell me what is in the Firefox Error Console:
   1. When Firefox starts
   2. After the error has occurred
3. Try the new version attached to that bug, and tell me if it works better

And of course, your Firefox version, environment, etc. I'd definitely be curious to know what other add-ons you have installed, as well.

If you're having this problem, I'd love to solve it for you, but I need your help. Comment on the bug] or drop me an email at paul@roub.net.

Update: probably fixed. Look over here...

This version is mainly of interest if you're testing Firefox 3. A bug was fixed where the "Always View This Page in IE" menu item would not always be enabled when it should. Also, IE View's name was showing up blank in the Tools/Add-ons list.

You can keep an eye on IE View bug fixes related to FF 3 here.

Features

• You can now edit the entries in the always-load-in-IE list - either via the Edit button or by double-clicking.
• Adding both secure (https) and non-secure (http) sites to the always-in-IE list when either one is added. That is, if you're viewing http://example.com/ and you choose "Always View This Page in IE" from the Tools menu, we'll add both the http://example.com/ and https://example.com/ to the list

Bug fixes

• Fixed IE View's behavior when opening multiple pages via the Open All in Tabs command.
• Cleaned up back-button behavior when the "reloaded in IE" placeholder page is used.

New translations

• Frisian
• Spanish (Argentina)

Thanks for the bug reports and testing; and a huge thanks to the BabelZilla volunteers. I didn't even know Frisian existed, and now my extension supports it.

Download at ieview.mozdev.org

... its availability also makes the site far less likely to change to support Firefox properly... I'm sure it's very handy for web developers for testing purposes, but is IETab actually working against what the Mozilla community is trying to achieve?

Ack.

No.

It's a tool. It's useful. It lets you view sites in IE's rendering, in a Firefox tab, if and only if you already have IE on your system. It doesn't confer any magical abilities, it just eliminates a step or two.

Full disclosure: IE Tab is based on my IE View extension, in the sense that they took my weekend afternoon hack and added the part that I didn't have the time or inclination to build and support. Which is to say, the hard part.

IE Tab's a slick piece of work, and people love it for a reason. But just as with IE View, we'd all rather the need went away. Please don't blame the tools in the meantime.

Changes in this version are minor, but if you're running under Mozilla, you'll want to get this -- it fixes an annoying popup message when using View Source. Update or new translations in this version: Turkish, Norsk, Chinese (Simplified), Khmer, German and Basque.

I should probably mention occasionally that IE View is a Firefox extension that lets you view pages and links in IE, with a click or automatically. Now you know.