Zotero & IE Tab

amc · March 14, 2007

A discussion in another thread got me curious enough to try an experiment. I have the Firefox extension IE Tab, which can use the IE rendering engine in Firefox tabs. So I loaded up Amazon in an IE tab, went to a book, and lo and behold, there was the Zotero icon in the address bar. Clicking on it imported the reference just like normal.

It may not work for all pages -- I don't know enough about the inner workings of Zotero or IE Tab to know how it would respond in other circumstances. In any case, it may serve as a workaround for sites that don't behave well in Firefox but do better in IE.

Tjowens · March 14, 2007

Thanks for his tip. I will add it to the new Tips Hacks and Tricks section we are developing for our documentation. Expect to see it there soon.

thanks

dstillman · March 14, 2007

amc -- are you sure you were viewing Amazon using IE Tab? Zotero doesn't even seem to get notifications of page loads when they're handled through IE, so I'm not really sure how it could be working for you. Certainly doesn't work for me with XP/FF2/IE6 under Parallels.

Even if it did get page load notifications, while Amazon might have a remote chance of working, since it makes a separate HTTP request to Amazon using the Amazon API (though I believe it still needs to access the page for some things), it definitely wouldn't work with the large majority of site translators that rely on page scraping, embedded metadata, etc. As noted on the other thread, Zotero has no way of accessing page contents when using IE as the rendering engine.