Chapter 11. Internet Explorer 7

Microsoft has gone to great lengths to integrate the Internet into every nook and cranny of Windows. Links and buttons that take you online are everywhere: on the Help screens, in the Windows freebie programs, and even in the "Send error report to Microsoft?" dialog boxes that appear after a program crashes. Once you've got your Internet connection working (Chapter 9), you may find that it's easier to go online than it is not to.

Internet Explorer (or IE, as it's often abbreviated) is the most famous Web browser on earth, thanks to several years of Justice-department scrutiny and newspaper headlines.

The greatly revamped version 7 offers boatloads of new features. A huge number of them are related to security, since most bugs and viruses enter your PC from the Internet: the new phishing filter, pop-up blocker, download blocker, Windows Defender, cookies manager, ActiveX blocking, Protected Mode, parental controls, and so on.

There's so much of this stuff, in fact, that they'd weigh this chapter down with all their negative energy. They've been offloaded to Chapter 10.

There are lots of great new productivity features, too, though: an RSS reader, tabbed browsing, a new Search bar, a new interface design, and so on. This chapter is all about using Internet Explorer to surf the Web.

(Hey, it could happen.)