Tips and Techniques for Better Web Surfing

Surfing Web pages with Internet Explorer is straightforward and easy, but even experienced users might not be aware of all the ways that they can open and navigate pages. Here’s a review of all the techniques you can use to open a Web page in Microsoft Windows XP:

• Type a URL in any Address bar. By default, all Internet Explorer and all Windows Explorer windows have an Address bar. To open a page, type the URL in the Address bar and press Enter.

• Type a URL in the Run dialog box. Select Start, Run, type the URL you want in the Run dialog box, and click OK.

• Select a URL from the Address bar. Internet Explorer’s Address bar doubles as a drop-down list that holds the last 15 addresses you entered.

• Use the Open dialog box for remote pages. In Internet Explorer, select File, Open (or press Ctrl+O) to display the Open dialog box, type the URL, and click OK.

• Use the Open dialog box for local pages. If you want to view a Web page that’s on your computer, display the Open dialog box, enter the full path (drive, folder, and file name), and click OK. Alternatively, click Browse, find the page, click Open, and then click OK.

• Select a favorite. Open the Favorites menu and click the site you want to open.

• Click a Links bar button. The Links bar contains several buttons that take you to predefined Web pages. (You can add buttons to the Links bar, remove existing buttons, and more. See “Customizing the Links Bar for One-Click Surfing,” later in this chapter.)

• Click a Web address in an Outlook Express message. When Microsoft Outlook Express recognizes a Web address in an e-mail message (that is, an address that begins with http://, https://, ftp://, www., and so on), it converts the address into a link. Clicking the link opens the address in Internet Explorer. Note, too, that many other programs are URL-aware, including the Microsoft Office suite of programs.

Once you’ve opened a page, you usually move to another page by clicking a link: either a text link or an image map. However, there are more techniques you can use to navigate to other pages:

• Open a link in another window. If you don’t want to leave the current page, you can force a link to open in another Internet Explorer window by right-clicking the link and then selecting Open In New Window. (You can open a new window for the current page by selecting File, New, Window, or by pressing Ctrl+N.)

  Tip

  Hold down Shift and click a link to open that link in a new browser window.

• Retrace the pages you’ve visited. Click Internet Explorer’s Back button to return to a page you visited previously in this session. Alternatively, select View, Go To, Back (or press Alt+Left arrow). Once you’ve gone back to a page, click the Forward button to move ahead through the visited pages. You can also select View, Go To, Forward (or press Alt+Right arrow.) Note, too, that the Back and Forward buttons also serve as drop-down lists. Click the downward- pointing arrow to the right of each button to see the list.

• Return to the home page. By default, when you launch Internet Explorer without specifying a URL, you end up at MSN, Internet Explorer’s default start page (http://www.msn.com/). You can return to Internet Explorer’s home page at any time by selecting View, Go To, Home Page, or by clicking the Home button on the toolbar (you can also press Alt+Home).

  Tip

  To change the home page, first surf to the page you want to use. Then select Tools, Internet Options, select the General tab, and in the Home Page section of the dialog box, click Use Current. Alternatively, drag the icon from the Address bar and drop it on the Home toolbar button. When Internet Explorer asks if you want to set your home page to the current page, click Yes.

• Use the History bar.If you click the toolbar’s History button or select the View, Explorer Bar, History command, Internet Explorer adds a History bar to the left side of the window. This bar lists the sites you’ve visited over the past 20 days. Just click a link to go to a site. Note that the items you see in the History bar are based on the contents of the %UserProfile%\Local Settings\History folder.

Navigating Sites Quickly and Easily Using the Address Bar

Internet Explorer’s Address bar (and the Address bar that appears in any Windows XP folder window) appears to be nothing more than a simple type- and-click mechanism. However, it’s useful for many things, and it comes with its own bag of tricks for making it even easier to use. Here’s a rundown:

• Internet Explorer maintains a list of the last 15 URLs and UNCs you typed into the Address bar. To access this list, press F4 and then use the Up and Down arrow keys to select an item from the list.

• To edit the Address bar text, press Alt+D to select it.

• To create a shortcut for whatever object is displayed in the Address bar, drag the object’s icon (it’s on the left side of the text box) and drop it on the desktop or some other location.

• The Address bar’s AutoComplete feature monitors the address as you type. If any previously entered addresses match your typing, those addresses appear in a list. To choose one of those addresses, use the Down arrow key to select it and then press Enter. The quickest way to use AutoComplete is to begin typing the site’s domain name. For example, if you want to bring up http://www.microsoft.com/, start typing the “microsoft” part. If you start with the full address, you have to type http://www. or just www., and then one other character.

• Internet Explorer assumes any address you enter is for a Web site. Therefore, you don’t need to type the http:// prefix because Internet Explorer will add it for you automatically.

• Internet Explorer also assumes that most Web addresses are in the form http://www.something.com. Therefore, if you simply type the “something” part and press Ctrl+Enter, Internet Explorer will automatically add the http://www. prefix and the .com suffix. For example, you can get to the Microsoft home page (http://www.microsoft.com) by typing microsoft and pressing Ctrl+Enter.

  Insider Secret

  One way to clear the Address bar list is to clear the History files. You do this by selecting Tools, Internet Options and, in the History section of the General tab, clicking Clear History. If you prefer to preserve the History, note that Internet Explorer stores the last 15 typed addresses in the following registry key:

  HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs

  You can therefore clear the Address bar’s history list by closing all Internet Explorer windows and deleting the settings url1 through url15 in this key. Here’s a script that will also do this:

  Option Explicit Dim objWshShell, i Set objWshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") For i = 1 to 15     objWshShell.RegDelete "HKCU\Software\Microsoft _     \Internet Explorer\TypedURLs\url" & i Next i

  Note that if there are fewer than 15 addresses in this history list, you will get a Windows Script Host error stating “Unable to remove registry key “HKCU\Software \Microsoft\Internet Explorer \TypedURLs\urln", where n is one greater than the number of history items found in the list. The message can be safely ignored; all the history items have been removed from the list.

• Some Web sites use frames to divide a Web page into multiple sections. Some of these sites offer links to other Web sites but, annoyingly, those pages appear within the first site’s frame structure. To break out of frames, drag a link into the Address bar.

• To search from the Address bar (AutoSearch), first type your search text. As you type, Internet Explorer adds Search for “text” below the Address bar, where text is your search text. When you’ve finished your search text, press Tab to select the Search for item and then press Enter. Alternatively, precede your search text with either the words go, find, or search, or with a question mark (?), as in these examples:

  go vbscript find autosearch search neologisms ? registry

Customizing the Links Bar for One-Click Surfing

The Links bar gives you one-click access to Web pages, and so is more convenient than even the Favorites folder (unless you have the Favorites bar displayed). To take full advantage of this convenience, you’ll want to redesign the Links bar so that its links and setup are suitable for the way you work. Here’s a list of a few techniques and options you can use to work with and customize the Links bar:

• Moving the Links bar By default, the Links bar appears to the right of the Address bar with only the title displayed. Unfortunately, this means you have to click twice to launch a link, which defeats the purpose of the toolbar. To get the one-click access back, move your mouse over the Links label and then drag the bar just below the Address bar, where it will lock into place. Remember, if the Links label will not move, you need to select View, Toolbars, Lock The Toolbars to remove the checkmark.

• Changing button positions The positions of the Links bar buttons are not permanent. To move any button, use your mouse to drag the button left or right along the Links bar.

• Renaming a button Right-click the button and then select Rename. Use the Rename dialog box to edit the name, and then click OK.

• Changing the URL for a button Right-click a button and then select Properties. On the Web Document tab, use the URL text box to edit the URL for the button.

• Creating a new link button To add a new Links bar button for the current page, drag the page icon from the Address bar and drop it on the Links bar. To add a new button for a hypertext link, drag the link and drop it on the Links bar. If you’ve already saved the page as a Favorite, open the Favorites menu, drag the icon from the menu and drop it inside the Links bar. If the page title is long, you’ll likely want to rename it to something shorter to avoid wasting precious Links bar space.

• Deleting a link To remove a button from the Links bar, right-click it and then select Delete.

  Insider Secret

  The Links bar buttons are URL shortcut files located in the %UserProfile%\Favorites\Links folder. You can use this folder to work with the shortcuts directly. Perhaps most importantly, you can also use the folder to create subfolders. When you click a subfolder in the Links bar, it displays a list of the URL shortcuts that are in that subfolder.