This freebie has so many clever features that there's no way to list them all. Here's a simple but particularly useful one: You can have the program automatically scroll down a Web page at one of three speeds. It's great for when you're reading a long Web page and don't want to have to scroll manually. Just choose the speed, and it'll scroll for you. Similarly, you can have the program autorefresh your current tab, at any interval you chose.

There's plenty more as well, including a forms filler and a mouse gestures feature that lets you do things such as scroll up or down, close tabs and go forward or back by right-clicking the mouse and making a gesture with it.

This is clearly the best of the bunch—it's staying in my browser.

Feeds Plus

The feed reader built into IE7 is one of its niftier features.

Make it even better with Feeds Plus, a free add-in built by members of Microsoft's RSS team. (Because Feeds Plus isn't an official Microsoft product, though, you won't get support.)

It adds a few nice features to IE7's RSS capabilities, including being able to read groups of feeds in a combined view, instead of one feed at a time. In addition, you can tell IE7 to notify you when there's new content in a feed—the Feeds Plus tray icon will glimmer.

Inline Search

Hate the way that Internet Explorer searches on a Web page, and wish it were more like Firefox?

Then you'll love this Inline Search, which in essence duplicates Firefox's search capabilities.

When you press Ctrl-F to search on a Web page (called inline search), you don't get the normal Internet Explorer floating search box.

Instead, as you can see in the nearby figure, a search box appears at the bottom of the page and you jump to search matches as you type.

IE7 Open Last Closed Tab

How often have you closed down a tab accidentally and wished that you could re-open it to the Web site you were just visiting? This little free add-in does it. After you've closed a tab, and wished you hadn't, press Alt-X, and the tab will re-open to the Web site you were visiting.

Even better, you can open not just the previous tab you closed, but ones you closed before that one as well. Press Alt-Q, and you'll see a list of all the tabs you've recently closed, as you can see in the nearby figure. Double-click any to reopen it. You can control how many tabs the program remembers in this way, from as few as five to as many as 200.