Load IE Only Sites Automatically in Firefox

Loren and I were having a mini discussion today about sites which only support IE and how often Firefox users are often left holding the bag. So I thought what better way to introduce myself to the Future of Real Estate Technology readers then by addressing how to use Firefox with sites and tools which support only IE. Which is particularly true in the real estate industry as many web-based applications including client management tools and MLS systems do not support Firefox.

So to get started if your a Firefox user and would like to still use IE only sites there is an extension called IE Tab which will allow you to open an IE only site in Firefox. Installation is easy so I will not address that here however there are some tricks which can improve your use of the IE Tab tool.

Once you have installed IE Tab and restarted Firefox you will notice a Firefox icon in the lower right-hand portion of your browser window.

For the following examples I am going to use HomesOpenToday.com a local (Bay Area California) open home portal site as it is vendor neutral and I know it loads differently in IE and in Firefox.

So if we we wanted to set every page on HomesOpenToday.com to open with IE Tab we would begin by right-clicking the icon pictured above. Once you right-click the icon an options window will appear from here simply put http://*.homesopentoday.com/* in the url box and click add. In the future whenever you visit HomesOpenToday.com in firefox, IE Tab will automatically load that page using IE as the rendering engine.

This setting is great if you want to use FireFox with your MLS or with a web-based application such as OWA (Outlook Web Access).

However, let us say that you wanted to load just a specific page using IE Tab. It is simple just bookmark the page as you always would, then append the following text at the beginning of the URL:

chrome://ietab/content/reloaded.html?url=

For example, if you wanted to always open HomesOpenToday using IE Tab :

Then bookmark http://www.homesopentoday.com and edit the bookmark by

Change it to:

chrome://ietab/content/reloaded.html?url=http://www.homesopentoday.com

Please note there will be some issues with using IE tab with unsupported sites for instance on Paragon 4.0 if you open a contact manager window or a CMA using IE Tab and IE7 you may get an error. However if you run the Paragon System Setup Utility it should fix the problem. Off the top of my head I do not know of any other browser and site specific issues but if you run into a problem I am sure Your Local Tech can give you a hand.

-Mark Flavin