Back when I first experienced in-line search in a browser, in an old version of Firefox - it may even have been Firebird back then - I wasn't sure how I liked it. It felt weird not to have a dialog box pop up. But I found that very quickly I grew to appreciate the way in which in-line search stays out of my way, and gets the job done better. Of course, since then, I've been wishing that IE could do the same thing, and yet that update just never came.

When the beta versions of IE7 came out, one of the first things I looked for was smarter find functionality, in other words in-line search like how Firefox does it. It just wasn't there. Luckily, I wasn't the only one waiting for this functionality, and an Inline Search plug-in for IE was born. Even better, In-line Search works for every version of IE from 5.5 onward.

There's not much more to say about it - it's just exactly what the doctor ordered. Microsoft, please take note.