Where to find Internet Explorer Accelerators after MS decimated IE Gallery

Question

Microsoft recently stripped most of the selection at the Internet Explorer Gallery leaving only a handful of Tracking Protection List (TPL) and Search Provider add-ons, but zero Accelerators.

Anyone know a good alternative "gallery" page?

I know of the short list at TCG Computers (mysteriously removed from the gallery years ago), and the old list at Tredosoft (search providers add-ons, no accelerators). I've also tried Wayback Machine, but no luck probably because the crawler doesn't go deep enough to also grab things like XML files that define accelerators. See for example their cached version of the Google Maps accelerator.

Accelerators still work fine on all those machines where they're already installed, so if I had access to one I could reconstruct them from registry data, but I don't. Favorite accelerators that I'm particularly looking for are:

Define with Wikipedia, Google Preview, Google Maps, Google Translate, Amazon Search Accelerator and Newegg Search. These used to be at http://www.iegallery.com/en-us/Addons/Details/888 for Define with Wikipedia, and replace 888 with 4058, 740, 738, 8406 and 1267 respectively for the other ones.

<rant> BTW, maybe MS trying to pretend there aren't accelerators for IE anymore has something to do with that this very useful feature was removed from successor Edge.

And in their infinite wisdom MS also very subtly ensured that that any feedback on the now-crippled gallery goes straight to the local bit-bucket, saving the precious bandwidth it would have taken sending it to their bit-bucket. (Under "Was this page helpful? - Your feedback helps improve this site", all three Yes|Somewhat|No answer buttons link to javascript:void(0)).

And I wouldn't be surprised if there's some fiddling with search results on that popular search engine run by the advertizing company that soooo dearly would like me to install their browser, which also doesn't do accelerators. After all, they even officially announced dropping the Don't be evil motto now.</rant>

Solution

After much digging, I found that the Way Back Machine DID archive the XML files associated with each entry, and I've been able to extract 144 OpenSearch and openService XML files from the old IE gallery.

There is a very rough page to list and add them on my site that will get tidied over the next few days.

Comments

[dave_thompson_085]

Re feedback: like many 'advanced' websites today, the feedback 'buttons' (actually text styled as buttons) use a meaningless href but an onclick which (if JS is enabled) does send to c.microsoft.com -- the full URL is about 800 chars, too much for SE comment, but you can see it with DevTools in your browser, or an interceptor like Burp. Whether feedback limited to a 3-state value could possibly result in actual improvement, much less whether it will, is a different question.