IE7Pro adds even more features to IE

The one must-have add-on for Internet Explorer is IE7Pro. It gives Microsoft's browser many of the features that Firefox aficionados consider essential, such as mouse gestures, ad blocking, user scripts, and other basic tweaks. Now IE7 users can add a session manager and prefetching to that list.

IE7Pro's session manager lacks polish but gets the job done.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Using IE7Pro is a snap. The add-on installs an icon on your IE status bar at the bottom, and you right-click it to access the IE7Pro options. Think of it as a context menu for your plugins. The Settings panel is accessible from that menu or using CTRL+F7 hotkeys.

The session manager is much simpler than the popular Session Manager plug-in for Firefox. It lacks most customizable settings that you might hope it would have, but it does allow IE to restart with your last opened tabs. Users must manually save the SESS file, but that's still a step up from not being able to save them at all.

The prefetching allows IE7 to download pages faster. Simple to configure by checking a box, it allows the browser to preload links and thus download pages faster. Also in this update, the MiniDM download manager gets support for dragging and dropping links.

There are fewer and fewer reasons to make IE7 your first-choice browser, but if you've got to use it for work or some other nefarious purpose, it's almost a crime to not use IE7Pro with it.