One of the most popular weblog posts from last week was 23 Chrome Extensions for Web professionals. The reason we created that article (besides the fact that we're slightly obsessed with all things Google these days) is that we noticed that Chrome usage was increasing on our site and on others. But what about Internet Explorer? Are there add-ons for IE that will benefit Web professionals? Absolutely, and you can bet your browser on that. Here are a few of our favorite IE browser add-ons perfect for any Web professional.

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Blogging: The real-time Web is all the rage, and there is no shortage of add-ons to assist Web professionals in finding out about the latest trends. OneRiot offers two excellent add-ons. Realtime Web Search from OneRiot offers results for news, blogs, videos and the Most Shared Today add-on offers those items with the greatest amount of distribution.Very much in line with the add-ons from OneRiot is Zemanta for IE. The add-on suggests tags, links, photos and related articles in real time as you type. If you already know what you're going to be writing about, then there are several IE add-ons that you will find useful. There are IE add-ons for Blogger, LiveJournal, and even Windows Live Spaces.

Search Engine Optimization: Quite surprisingly to me, WM did not find many valuable add-ons for the SEOs. Twingly Blog Links could prove useful, however, as it lets users find blogs linking to the page being viewed. 

Social Sharing/Bookmarking: There are a few strong social sharing add-ons for IE. Based on ratings, Shareaholic and Add to Any seem to be the most popular, and provide access to a number of social destinations. There are a few standalone sharing add-ons. Blinklist, Furl and Simpy to name just two. The Digg Accelerator is one that has already made its way into our IE installations as have the Share on Facebook, Delicious and Stumbleupon add-ons. 

URL Shorteners: IE has loads of add-ons for those that need to shorten long URLs, to.ly, FLQ, TinyURL, bit.ly and tr.im for example.

Total Randomness: We'd be negligent if we didn't mention IE7pro, an add-on from Daniel Fang that features tabbed browsing enhancement, ad block, and user scripts. Another noteworthy add-on for Internet Explorer is Xmarks which syncs and backs up bookmarks favorites. Lightshot is another rather valuable add-on we've come across for taking and sharing screenshots.