How to automatically highlight new content from a website in Internet Explorer [Tip]

Internet Explorer doesn’t have a huge number of extensions compared to alternative browsers. However, one notable extension you can to IE is Diff-IE that highlights website updates. That highlights any new text added to the page.

You can add this extension to Internet Explorer from this page. There press the Download button to add Diff-IE to the browser. It adds a new toolbar to Internet Explorer just below the address bar as shown in the shot below.

Diff-IE3

Next, open a website page. However, the add-on won’t highlight anything until there are some notable updates on the page. The first time you open the page will be a time that you can later select from the Compare to drop-down list as in the shot below.

Diff-IE2

When some new text is added to the page, you can see the difference by clicking the Show/hide diffs button on the left of the Diff-IE toolbar. For instance, when I clicked on that button it highlighted new text on dotTech in yellow as below. For some further examples of Diff-IE in action, open this page.

Diff-IE

You can select further options by pressing the Adjust Diff-IE button on the toolbar. Pressing that button opens the window in the shot below. From there you can select alternative highlighter colors by clicking the Highlight color box and choosing an alternative color from the palette. There you can also configure caching options and ignore sites from being cached. Click the Cache tab to adjust the maximum number of versions per page.

Diff-IE4

Overall, this is an effective Internet Explorer add-on for tracking changes to website pages. It can be handy for finding active forum threads, checking blog updates and to updated page lists.

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