Very often when you're testing Web content you'll want to test what a page looks like and how it works under multiple browsers. If you, like me, prefer Firefox, then launching and switching to Internet Explorer is a total pain.

Enter IE Tab. This is, an extension that works with Firefox as well as Flock and SeaMonkey (all under Windows) that allows you to load a page rendered by the IE engine as a tab under any of the supported browsers.

To use IE Tab you must already have IE installed on your computer, and as far as I can determine it operates by simply calling the IE rendering engine and redirecting its output to a Firefox tabbed pane. Very cunning.

The result is that not only will the pages shown using IE Tab be in the host browser’s history, but they will also be in the history of the local copy of IE and in its local cache.

This technique is robust enough that content that will only run in IE will run under IE Tab in Firefox. This notably includes Windows Update, which runs perfectly happily under IE Tab!

The beauty of IE Tab is that it allows you to consolidate the majority of your browsing to, in effect, one browser.

According to notes in the Wikipedia article on IE Tab: “IE Tab will install on computers running Linux or Mac OS, but will only show a blank screen with the URL undefined. However, the Windows version of Firefox installed on Linux with Wine will successfully run IE Tab.”

With IE Tab installed you can set specific URLs to be loaded using the IE rendering engine only as well as change rendering engines for the current page on the fly.

I wrote about developer tools for Firefox in my Gearhead column some weeks ago, and IE Tab is another utility I can see becoming really useful.

Let me know what utilities and add-ons are in your toolbox these days, if I get enough input I’ll write a newsletter listing the top tools. Come on … don’t be shy!

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.