Believe it or not, there are some government run websites that not only show the warning – “this website is best viewed in Internet Explorer”, but they also prove it to be true too. If you try to access such websites using Firefox or Chrome, then everything looks out of place and some things just stop working. If you do not want to run both Chrome and Internet Explorer browsers side by side, then you can use the IE Tab extension in Chrome to open an Internet Explorer tab right inside the Chrome browser. This way, you do not have to open many browser windows and can access sites favoring Internet Explorer without leaving Chrome.
The IE Tab extension, which works only in Windows based computers, requires that you download and run a small application called IETabHelper.exe when try to open the IE Tab for the very first time by clicking on its toolbar icon. After you launch the IETabHelper.exe file, a new Internet Explorer tab is opened inside Chrome. You can open any website inside this tab as you would open sites in any other browser.
If you want to see which version of Internet Explorer is being used by IE Tab, then you can open whatismybrowser.com in the newly opened Internet Explorer tab. This web site gives you some details about your web browser. In this case, it would show that you are using Internet Explorer 7 on a Windows 8 PC (even though you may be running a higher version of IE or Windows).
This is because IE Tab emulates Internet Explorer 7 by default. You can change the version of Internet Explorer used from the IE Tab settings. You can switch to many different versions from Internet Explorer 7 to Internet Explorer 11 – provided that you have Internet Explorer of same version or higher version installed in your Windows PC.
Conclusion: IE Tab is an effective solution for accessing those websites in Chrome properly that favor Internet Explorer over other browsers without having to open multiple web browser web sites.
You can get IE Tab for Chrome from http://www.ietab.net/.