How to turn firefox into internet explorer

For people who prefer the look of the Internet Explorer browser but like the capabilities of Firefox, there's a happy medium. Mozilla Firefox has a number of unique features, not the least of which is its extensive and ever-growing library of extensions (or add-ons). Some of those add-ons can be used to turn Firefox into a visual clone of Internet Explorer.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• "Looks Familiar" Theme
• Firefox Internet Explorer Icon Pack
• Firesomething 1.8 add-on

1. Change the theme of your Firefox browser to one that looks like Internet Explorer. Open a Firefox browser window and go to the Tools menu and select "Add-ons." Click on "Get Extensions." This will bring you to the add-ons page at Mozilla. Type "Looks Familiar" into the search field at the top, and when it is found click on the "Add to Firefox" button.

2. Apply the theme by installing Looks Familiar. A pop-up menu will instruct you to install the them. Then close your browser window and restart Firefox to institute the change.

3. Change the window icons to make them look like IE. This can be accomplished by downloading the Firefox Internet Explorer Pack from Mozilla (see Resources below). Once you've downloaded the file, you'll need to unzip it, wait for the directories to be created and then restart Firefox again to apply the icon changes.

4. Turn the Firefox toolbar into an Internet Explorer toolbar. Right-click in the toolbar and choose "Customize." This will bring up a menu of items you can add to the toolbar. Hit the "Add New Toolbar" button, name the toolbar "Address Toolbar" and drag your current address bar onto the new one.

5. Continue to redesign the toolbar from the "Customize" menu described in Step 4. Remove the Search Box by dragging it to the buttons window. Reposition the "Stop" button to the left of the "Refresh" icon and put a vertical line separator between the "Home" (house icon) and "Bookmark" (star icon) buttons. Place another separator after the "History" (clock icon) button and then place the "Print" (printer icon) button. When you're finished customizing the toolbar, click "Done."

6. Download and install Firesomething to finish making the window look like IE (see Resources below). Restart Firefox after the download, then go to the Tools menu and choose "Add-ons." Click on the Firesomething extension and customize the options by deleting the Prefixes, typing "Internet Explorer" into the Names field and typing "Microsoft" in the Vendors field. Make sure to enable the option that uses the generated name, apply the changes and exit the window.

Tips & Warnings

• There are are a variety of other extensions that can make smaller, miscellaneous changes. Among them are the Plain Old Favorites, Menu Editor and IE Tab extensions (see Resources below).
• If you're running Seamonkey instead of Firefox, there is an IE Skin available. Unfortunately, it's not been ported to Firefox.

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