Filed under: Internet, Microsoft, Browsers
Pimp Internet Explorer 8 Part 2: accelerators, slices, and search
Before we get started on Part 2, one more note for IE7 users: the Mycroft search additions at the end of this page will work just fine for you, too!
EMail Accelerators - AOL, GMail, and Live Mail accelerators make sending content to your friends quick and easy.
Share on Twitter - opens a new tab with your Twitter home and auto-fills selected text into your status update box.
Translate with Google - IE8 comes with the Windows Live translator built-in, but Google's tool just works better.
Define with Wikipedia - You may also want to replace the included Encarta tool with this one to search Wikipedia. Previews don't always work, but that appears to be an issue with IE8, not this accelerator.
Wayback Machine - check for older versions of the page you're viewing.
Digg Top Ten - shows the hottest items from Digg's main page and the number of diggs for each.
StumbleUpon Buzz - like the Digg slice, this one shows what's getting Stumbled by the crowd. Formatting can be hit-or-miss with this one.
Weather from Live Search - displays current weather conditions for your area.
IE8's search box has a number of nice features, including Visual Search previews and "quick pick" search engine selection. It also supports OpenSearch, meaning you can add tons of providers from the Mycroft project - like the ones listed on their Top 100.
OpenSearch - to install these, click on the site name to the right of its favicon. These are all IE7 compatible.
Google Blog Search and Technorati - quickly get results for posts from the blogosphere.
Twitter search - allows you to search Twitter status updates from the search bar.
Usniff - multi-tracker torrent file search. NowTorrents offers a plugin as well, but it didn't work for me in IE8.
YouTube - the most popular Mycroft plugin lets you find videos in a jiffy.
Visual Search
Visual Amazon and Visual Ebay - These both add useful thumbnail images to your search suggestions. The relatively small thumbnails don't work so well with some other Visual Search options (like Wikipedia), but they're very handy for window shopping on Amazon and eBay.
New York Times - another succesful implementation of Visual Search. Provides links to articles ordered by dates. Neat trick NYT: you've got one listed with tomorrow's date!
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
