Right-click on the IE Tab icon and select “Options” to see all of the options, including the Auto URLs.
Auto URLs are one of the most important features of IE Tab. You typically need IE Tab for just a subset of the web pages you visit. For example, you might want to use IE Tab for all of your Microsoft Sharepoint pages. Auto URLs enable you to specify which pages should be opened in IE Tab automatically so you don’t have to click on the IE Tab icon.
Auto URLs are specified as a filter string in one of two ways:
Exact string match with wildcard
With this mechanism, you specify a string that matches the full URL that should be opened with IE Tab. You may use an * to represent any sequence of characters at that point in the string. Note again that the entire string must match the URL, so it is common to include an ‘*’ at the end of the string. Here are some examples:
- file://*
- http://www.microsoft.com/*
- *java-applets-server*
- https://www.hr-sharepointsite.com/*
Regular expressions
Regular expressions allow for more power in specifying your match strings. These are ECMAScript regular expressions.
A regular expression is indicated by prefixing the regular expression with “r/”. Here are some examples:
- r/https?://www.microsoft.com/.*
- r/https?://[^/].*activex.*
Per-URL IE Compatibility Mode
There is an option to set a single default IE compatibility mode for all URLs. But sometimes you need different URLs to use different compatibility modes (e.g. one URL runs in IE 8, another in IE 9).
This can be accomplished using an Auto URL advanced option, which means prefixing the Auto URL string with square brackets and setting the corresponding compatibility mode designator in the brackets. This will determine the compatibility mode to be used whenever a matching URL is opened. The following compatibility modes are available:
- ie7s – IE 7 standards
- ie8s – IE 8 standards
- ie8f – IE 8 forced
- … you get the picture
- ie11f – IE 11 forced
Here are some examples:
- [ie8s]http://www.microsoft.com/*
- [ie10f]http://internal-sharepoint-server/*
Local Network Support
(This feature only applies to the Mac & Chromebook versions of IE Tab)
IE Tab for Mac & Chromebook uses remote servers to render the web pages. These remote servers will not have access to URLs that can only be accessed from your local network.
But IE Tab provides a means of sending all requests back through your local computer to access those URLs. This will be slightly slower than normal since all requests have to make an additional round-trip, but performance is normally acceptable if the web site uses caching intelligently.
There are two ways you can enable this local access:
- Enable it for all IE Tab usage. If you are only using IE Tab to access local network URLs then turn on the option “Resolve all URLs through local network”. But if you are using IE Tab for both internal and external URLs, then do not enable this setting as it will negatively impact performance for the URLs that are not local, use the following functionality instead:
- Enable it for specific URLs. You can use an Auto URL advanced filter to force IE Tab to use your local Network for specific URLs. You do this by adding [local] to the Auto URL, for example: [local]http://intranetserver/*
Console Errors
All error messages are displayed in the error console. Any error message that happens within the page that is loaded in IE Tab will be prefixed with “IE: ” in the console. Here is an example:
> IE: Error: Object doesn’t support property or method ‘addEventListener’. Source: http://www.mywebsite.com/thepage.html:12
Executing in-page script
From the console, you can execute code within the IE Tab page with the special “ie.eval” function. Here are some sample commands and responses from the eval statement:
> ie.eval(“document.URL”) IE: http://www.ietab.net/ > ie.eval(“(function() { return ‘Mode = ‘ + document.documentMode; })()”); IE: Mode = 10 >