11.6. Tips for Better Surfing: All Versions Internet Explorer is filled with shortcuts and tricks for better speed and more pleasant surfing. For example: 11.6.1. Full-Screen Browsing IE7's toolbars and other screen doodads take up less space in the Vista version than in previous versions, but they still eat up screen space. The Web is supposed to be a visual experience; this encroachment of your monitor's real estate isn't necessarily a good thing. But if you press F11 (or choose View  Full Screen from the Classic menus ), all is forgiven. The browser window explodes to the very borders of your monitor, hiding the Explorer bar, toolbars, and all. The Web page youre viewing fills your screen, edge to edgea glorious, liberating experience. You can return to the usual crowded, toolbar-mad arrangement by pressing F11 againbut you'll be tempted never to do so. 11.6.2. Picking a Home Page The first Web site you encounter when IE connects to the Internet is a Microsoft Web siteor Dell, or EarthLink; the point is, you didn't choose it. This site is your factory-set home page . Unless you actually work for Microsoft, Dell, or EarthLink, however, you'll probably find Web browsing more fun if you specify your own favorite Web page as your startup page. The easiest way to go about it is to follow the instructions shown in Figure 11-10.  | Figure 11-10. Top: Start by visiting the page you want to designate as your home page. Then, from the Home menu identified here, choose Add or Change Home Page .
Bottom: In this dialog box, choose "Use this webpage as your only home page," and click Yes . | |
Google makes a nice home page; so does a news site. But here are a couple of possibilities that might not have occurred to you: -
A blank page . If you can't decide on a home page, or your mood changes from day to day, set up a blankemptyhome page. This setup makes IE load very quickly when you first launch it. Once this window opens, then you can tell the browser where you want to go today. To set this up, open the Home menu (Figure 11-10) and choose Remove Remove All; in the confirmation box, click Yes. -
Multiple home page tabs . This is a cool one. Now that Internet Explorer can display tabs, you can designate a bunch of them to open all at once each time you fire up Internet Explorer. It's a great way to avoid wasting time by calling up one site after another, because they'll all be loading in the background as you read the first one.
Note: Choose "Tab settings" on page 375; a few settings there pertain exclusively to home page tab groups.
The quickest way to set up a Home tab set: Open all the Web sites into their own tabs, just the way you'll want IE to do automatically in the future. Then, from the Home menu, choose Add or Change Home Page. Next, in the dialog box (Figure 11-10, bottom), select "Use the current tab set as your home page," and click Yes. Thereafter, you can always add additional tabs to this starter set by choosing "Add this webpage to your home page tabs," the bottom option shown in Figure 11-10. UP TO SPEED
Faster Browsing Without Graphics | | Sure, sure, graphics are part of what makes the Web so compelling. But they're also responsible for making Web pages take so long to arrive on the screen. Without them, Web pages appear almost instantaneously. You still get fully laid-out Web pages; you still see all the text and headlines. But wherever a picture would normally be, you see an empty rectangle containing a generic "graphic goes here" logo, usually with a caption explaining what that graphic would have been. To turn off graphics, choose Tools Internet Options, which opens the Internet Options dialog box. Click the Advanced tab, scroll down halfway into the list of checkboxes, and turn off "Show pictures (in the Multimedia category of checkboxes). Now try visiting a few Web pages. You'll feel a substantial speed boost, especially if you're connected by dial-up modem. And if you wind up on a Web page that's nothing without its pictures, you can choose to summon an individual picture. Just right-click its box and choose Show Picture from the shortcut menu. |
Note: Although it's a little more effort, you can also edit your home page (or home page tab sets) manually in a dialog box, rather than opening them up first.Choose Tools Internet Options General. In the "Home page text box, type each address, complete with http:// and so on. If you want to create a home page tab set, type each address on its own line. (Leave the box empty for a blank home page.) Click OK, OK?
11.6.3. Bigger Text, Smaller Text When your eyes are tired , you might like to make the text bigger. When you visit a site designed for Macintosh computers (whose text tends to look too large on PC screens), you might want a smaller size. You can adjust the point size of a Web page's text using the Page Text Size commands. 11.6.4. Zooming In and Out So much for magnifying the text; what about the whole Web page? There are plenty of ways to zoom in or out of the whole affair: -
If you have a scroll-wheel mouse, press the Ctrl key as you turn the mouse's wheel. (This works in Microsoft Office programs, too.) -
Press Ctlr+plus or Ctrl+minus on your keyboard. -
Use the pop-up menu in the lower-right corner of the window (where it probably says "100%" at the moment). Just clicking the digits repeatedly cycles the page among 100, 125, and 150 percent of actual size. Alternatively, you can use its  menu to choose any degree of zoom from 50 to 400 percentor choose Custom to type anything in between. 11.6.5. Online Photos Internet Explorer is loaded with features for handling graphics online. Right-clicking an image on a Web page, for example, produces a shortcut menu that offers commands like Save Picture As, E-mail Picture, Print Picture, and Set as Background (that is, wallpaper).
Tip: To turn off IE's picture-shrinking feature, choose Tools Internet Options. Click the Advanced tab, scroll down to the Multimedia heading, and turn off "Enable Automatic Image Resizing." Click OK.
11.6.6. Saving Pages You can make Internet Explorer store a certain Web page on your hard drive so that you can peruse it lateron your laptop during your commute, for example. The short way is to choose Page Save As. For greatest simplicity, choose "Web Archive, single file (*.mht)" from the "Save as type drop-down list. (The other options here save the Web page as multiple files on your hard drivea handy feature if you intend to edit them, but less convenient if you just want to read them later.) Name the file and click the Save button. You've just preserved the Web page as a file on your hard drive, which you can open later by double-clicking it. 11.6.7. Sending Pages Internet Explorer provides two different ways of telling a friend about the page you're looking at. You might find that useful when you come across a particularly interesting news story, op-ed piece, or burrito recipe. -
The send-the-whole-page method . While looking at a page, choose Page Send Page by E-Mail to open a new Mail message with a copy of the actual Web page in the body. Address the message and click Send. Not all recipients, however, will be able to see the message; some email programs can't display HTML messages like this one. (Such programs show only plain-text messages.) -
The send-a-link method . To send just a link to the page you're looking at, choose Page Send Link by E-mail. Then proceed as usual, addressing the message and clicking Send. All your recipients have to do is click the link to open it in their Web browsers.
Tip: The Page menu also offers the curious Edit with Notepad command. It opens the raw, underlying HTML coding of the page in Notepad, so that you can inspect and make changes to ita great way to make emergency changes to the text of your own Web page when you're on the road and have no other editing tools on hand.
11.6.8. Printing Pages Printing has been vastly improved in Internet Explorer 7. The decade of chopped-off printouts is over. Now, when you choose Print (the little printer icon) all of the Web page's text is auto-shrunk to fit within the page.
Tip: You can print only part of a page, too. Drag through the portion you want, press Ctrl+P, click Selection, and then click Print.
Better yet, if you choose Print Print Preview, you get a handsome preview of the end result. The icons in the Print Preview window include buttons like these: -
Portrait, Landscape (Alt-O, Alt+P) controls the page orientation: upright or sideways . -
Turn headers and footers on or off (Alt+E) hides or shows the header (the text at the top of the printout, which usually identifies the name of the Web site you're printing and the number of pages) and the footer (the URL of the Web page, and the date). -
View Full Width (Alt+W) blows up the preview to fill your screen, even if it means you'll have to scroll down to see the whole page. (This option has no effect on the printout itself.) -
View Full Page (Alt+1) restores the original view, where the entire printout preview is shrunk down to fit your screen. -
1 Page View pop-up menu governs how many pages fit in the preview window at a time. -
Change Print Size pop-up menu affects the size of the image on the printed pages. Shrink to Fit adjusts the printout so that it won't be chopped off, but you can manually magnify or reduce the printed image by choosing the other percentage options in this menu.
Tip: Lots of Web sites have their own "Print this Page" buttons. When they're available, use them instead of Internet Explorer's own Print command. The Web site's Print feature not only makes sure the printout won't be chopped off, but it also eliminates ads, includes the entire article (even if it's split across multiple Web pages), and so on.
11.6.9. Turn Off Animations If blinking ads make it tough to concentrate as you read a Web-based article, choose Tools Internet Options Advanced tab, and then scroll down to the Multimedia heading (Figure 11-11). Turn off "Play animations in web pages to stifle most animated ads. Alas, it doesn't stop all animations; the jerks of the ad-design world have grown too clever for this option.  | Figure 11-11. Choosing Tools Internet Options opens this dialog box, the identical twin of the Internet Options program in the Control Panel. Two of its tabs are shown here. Double-click one of the headings (like "Accessibility) to collapse all of its checkboxes. Your sanity is the winner here . | |
Take a moment, too, to look over the other annoying Web page elements that you can turn off, including sounds. 11.6.10. Internet Options Internet Explorer's Options dialog box offers roughly 68,000 tabs, buttons, and nested dialog boxes. Most of the useful options have been described, in this chapter, with their appropriate topics (like Tabbed Browsing). Still, by spending a few minutes adjusting Internet Explorer's settings, you can make it more fun (or less annoying) to use. To open this cornucopia of options, choose Tools Internet Options (Figure 11-11).  |
