I’m curious which add-ons do you use?
Some of the small utilities are:
IE Booster 2
ie5webaccessories
ieSpell
webdevaccess
The old tabbed IE-based browser [Fastbrowser Pro] has a built-in text2speech reader feature that is nice for lengthy articles when old eyes are tired. I use FBP primarily for FR because it works very well with the ‘archaic’ format.
[Note that I am not complaining about FR being ‘archaic’ — because I prefer it without the enhancements and glitz and glitter on most other websites.]