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BOOT CAMP 417 (28/03/06)
WEB BROWSER TOP TIPS
With
something like an 85 percent share of the market Internet Explorer continues to
be the world’s most popular web browser but it’s a tough business and Mozilla Firefox is now
firmly ensconced on more than 12 percent of UK PC user’s desktops.
Microsoft
is clearly concerned by the impact the competition is having and has responded
with the new and much improved Internet Explorer 7,
now in its public beta testing phase. It remains to be seen how much impact it
will have but for the moment it’s safe to assume that most of you are using
Internet Explorer so that’s where we’ll begin with this first batch of tips and
tweaks; next week it’s the turn of Firefox.
Here
are a few easy ones to start with for increasing the size of your browser
window by a couple of centimetres, so you’ll see more of the web page and spend
less time scrolling and clicking. There’s a lot of wasted space on the IE
toolbars so the first trick is to right-click onto a toolbar and uncheck the
item ‘lock the toolbars’. Move your mouse pointer onto the Address button (to the
left of the Address box), right click and hold and the cursor changes to a four
pointed arrow. Keep the mouse button and pressed drag the button onto the menu
bar, just to the right of Help and release.
Now
right-click onto a toolbar, select Customize, next to Icon Options at the
bottom click the drop-down arrow and select Small Icons then Close. If you’ve
been using IE for a while you should know what all the buttons do by now so
claw back another slice of screen space by selecting ‘No Text Labels’ in the
Text Options drop-down menu. Finally, if you are using the Links toolbar (more
on that in a moment) and you have less than half a dozen or so items on it you
can probably find room for it on the Standard icon bar so click and drag the
vertical separator bar on the left hand edge of the Links toolbar to its new
location. When you are happy with the layout right-click on the toolbar again
and select ‘Lock the Toolbars’ to stop them shifting around.
If
you need a quick increase in screen size just press the F11 function key and
this toggles IE between Full Screen and Normal View. One last big-screen tip
and this is a hidden facility within IE called ‘Kiosk’ mode. It’s useful for
demonstrations and presentations as it displays a full screen web page, with no
toolbars or icons, so it cannot be tampered with. To start IE in Kiosk mode go
to Run on the Start menu and type: iexplore -k <site>, where <site>
is the full address of the website you want to display. For example, to show
the opening page of the Boot Camp Top Tips Archive the command would be:
‘iexplore
-k http://www.rickmaybury.com/photo.html’
(without the quotes).
Back
now to the Links toolbar, which is a way to get to your favourite websites with
a single click. If you haven’t yet discovered this very useful facility I
suggest that you give it a try. Right-click into an empty area of a Toolbar and
click Links. By default it’s filled with a load of bumph so right-click on each
item that you don’t want and select Delete. Now you can add your own Links. Go
to the web site then left click and drag the icon that appears to the left of
the address in the Address box onto the Links toolbar. If the text label is too
big right-click on the Links icon, select Properties then the General tab and
you can edit the icon title.
If
your Favorites list is getting too long rather than delete entries, which you
might regret, you can set IE to display just the most recently visited ones. Go
to Tools > Internet Options and select the Advanced tab. Under the Browsing
heading check the item ‘Enable Personalized Favorites menu’. Click OK to exit
the box and your Favorites should now be a lot easier to navigate, and if you
want to see the rarely visited bookmarks just click the arrow to show the whole
list.
Talking
of Favorites, here’s an easier way to manage them. Just go to Run on the Start
menu and type ‘Favorites’ (no quotes and watch the US spelling) and your
Favourites folder will open in a familiar Explorer type window. You can now
rename and delete entries, create new folders and change web addresses. One
thing you can’t do there is organise the Favorites list alphabetically, you
have to do that in IE, open the list, right-click on the top entry and select
Sort by Name.
NEXT WEEK - Firefox Tips
JARGON FILTER
BETA TESTING
Final pre-release test of a piece of software,
made available to testers and volunteers on an at-their-own-risk basis, to help
identify any last remaining bugs, glitches and conflicts
FUNCTION KEYS
Row of keys along the top of the keyboard,
function varies according to the application concerned but F1 is traditionally
Help
TOP TIP
Here’s an easy way to
print out a list of your IE Favorites, without the need for any extra software.
Open IE and go to File > Import Export > Next, click Export Favorites
then Next, then Next again and in the ‘Export to a File or Address’ box type
‘C:\favprint.htm’ (without the quotes) then click Finish and OK. Now go to IE’s
address bar and type ‘C:\favprint.htm’. press Enter and your Favourites list
will appear. You can print as-is, but if you also want to print the site
addresses go to Print on the File menu, select the Options tab and check the
item ‘Print table of links’, click the General tab and click the Print button.
The web addresses will be printed after the Favorites list.
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© R. Maybury 2006, 2203
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