Quero Toolbar IE add-on

Executive summary: limited time to work on the project, experimental version for IE9 released, after upgrading go to Quero > Options > Appearance: enable IE navigation bar, disable IE9 address box / navigation buttons.

Quero Toolbar in IE9

Hi, I would like to post a status update about Quero, since IE9 Beta was released on September 15th 2010. I received several emails asking me about the current state of the project.

I made some personal changes last year. I moved away from my previous developing/research job in IT to begin something completeley new in the space of fashion and art :)

Since Quero has always been more or less a spare time (night) and research project for me, I have now only limited time to devote to it, and regarding the recent race (war) in Web browser development, I thought it was wise to move forward and to focus on my new project.

Additionally, I am quite impressed about IE9, what I have seen so far, Internet Explorer has advanced a great step forward, including full standard support (for html5, css3, svg, canvas, video), full hardware acceleration and a completely new, fast JavaScript engine.

Finally, IE has now adopted, what Quero did for the last six years, combining the address and search box into ONE box, a logical and highly anticipated step in my opinion :)

Also advertising has changed: not all commercial Web sites are that bad any more, some sites such as Facebook use intelligent unobtrusive ads, others have found new forms to monetize their content, ...

However, I am very glad to announce that I found a way to make Quero compatible with IE9 Beta 1 with the following update:

Quero Toolbar 5.1 released

  • experimental support for IE9 Beta added
  • after upgrading go to Quero > Options > Appearance, enable IE navigation bar, disable IE9 address box / navigation buttons.
  • new IE9-compatible Flash blocker: hides all Flash objects after the site has loaded (shortcut Ctrl+Del).

I have decided to move away from the ugly hack that was necessary to build the content and ad filter in previous versions. The code is still there, but does not work 100% in IE9 because of the new JavaScript enigne, not all script commands are filtered.

You can now (additionally) enable Hide Flash (it is now a toggle switch like the other ad blocking options). The beauty of the old/new Hide Ads approach is, that it is solely based on standardized APIs and could also be developed further to filter out other undesireable content in a Greasemonkey-style fashion. The disadvantage is that the content is downloaded first and appears on the page for a short time before it can be detected and hidden.

Developing Quero was so exciting for me. I would like to thank you for supporting me and giving encouraging feedback :) Just in case you missed the news, Quero is an open source project and can be reused, modified and improved by everyone under the GPL license.

IE9, Quero Toolbar 5.1 forum discussion