* Why you could love the IE Context Menu Toolset
As all males know, there’s no such thing as owning too many power tools. That right angle drill that you bought on impulse might only ever get used once or twice in your entire life but you know that those two times will be the times that try men’s souls and you will not be found wanting.
Much the same philosophy applies to utility software – when you need those obscure functions and they are right there to hand (or perhaps that should be “to mouse”), life is so much easier.
In today’s newsletter, I have a new power tool for you that is not only extremely useful, it is also free: The IE Context Menu Toolset from Matt Kruse (see editorial links below). In fact, this is a utility that you’ll probably use a lot more often than that right angle drill.
The Toolset is a fast download and install. Once you restart IE right click in a page and you’ll find the tools added to your context menu. The tools consist of:
* Dictionary Lookup, which will, if text is selected, open a new window to dictionary.com directed to that text or, if no text is selected, display a prompt for a word to lookup.
* Force All Links To Open In A New Window (which does as you might guess).
* Show Hidden Inputs that forces hidden form inputs to be visible (useful for form debugging).
* Show Link Targets, which changes the TITLE property of all links on a page so that the tool tip display shows the link’s HREF, OnClick, and TARGET properties, as well as the previous TITLE.
* Toggle DIV/SPAN Borders so that DIVs are shown by a red dashed line and all SPANs by a blue dashed line. Also sets the TITLE property of the DIVs and SPANs so that the tool tip shows the ID and CLASS of the tag.
* Toggle Link Highlights shows all links on the page in yellow.
* Toggle Table Borders sets BORDER=1 for all tables.
* View Archived Page, perhaps the most interesting function, this feature looks for an archived version of the page at Google or the Wayback Machine if the current page gives a 404 error.
* ZOOM –> in <– lets you zoom in or out of the page by any percentage you please.
This is an incredibly simple idea but one that I haven’t seen anything quite like. If you find these tools really useful – say, more useful than that right angle drill – there’s one more context menu option that you might like to select labeled “CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT DEVELOPMENT!” which takes you to a PayPal-enabled Web page.
