How to create your own custom Accelerator for Internet Explorer
The Accelerator feature of the IE helps to quickly perform everyday browsing tasks without leaving the website. Simply highlight the text, click on the blue Accelerator icon that appears above your selection, it will popup the different Accelerator options. For example, with the “Map with Bing” Accelerator in Internet Explorer, you can get an in-place view of a map displayed directly on the page.
In this example, I am creating an Accelerator for searching StackOverflow.com. The Accelerator is simply an XML file, you can find more details about this XML specification here
Here is the implementation
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
<homepageUrl>http://www.stackoverflow.com/</homepageUrl>
<display>
<name>Search with Stackoverflow</name>
<icon>http://sstatic.net/stackoverflow/img/favicon.ico</icon>
<description>Search with Stackoverflow</description>
</display>
<activity category="Search">
<activityAction context="selection">
<execute method="get" action="http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=">
<parameter name="q" value="{selection}" type="text" />
</execute>
</activityAction>
</activity>
</openServiceDescription>
Also you require a HTML file to install the Accelerator to IE. It will use window.external.AddService method. Here is the HTML file.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Add SO Search Accelerator</title>
<meta content="text/html; charset=windows-1255" http-equiv="Content-Type"/>
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.18372"/>
</head>
<body>
<button id="myButton"
onclick="window.external.AddService('http://localhost/installs/search_so.xml')">
Press to add SO Search Accelerator</button>
</body>
</html>
Pressing on the button will popup, an Add Accelerator dialog, click on Add button, which will add the accelerator to your browser.
Add Accelerator Dialog
And here is the Accelerator in action.
Accelerator in Action
Happy Coding 