Using a Browser
Here we will take a closer look at web browsers - programs like Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape and Safari. By default the Microsft Windows family uses Internet Explorer, MacOS Safari, and Linux distributions tend to come with Firefox. It is, however, your personal preference as to which one you decide to use. The Basic functions of a browser remain the same - to display text or images that a user is able to interact with on the World Wide Web (WWW).
Which Browser Should I Use?
Its entirely up to personal choice which browser you use, there is no reason to use internet explorer just because it came with windows. There is some sense in using a different browser than IE as it tends be be a target for security exploits. You can download Firefox, Opera and Netscape for free!
Firefox: Firefrox is free and available for Windows, MacOSX and Linux. It's a popular and well liked alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. You can download it here. Firefox is the Web-browser and Mozilla is a complete suite of utilities including mail and development tools. I'm not going to re-invent the wheel, there's a complete how-to install and use Firefox here. There are step-by-step instructions show how you can import all your internet Explorer settings to Firefox.
Opera: Opera is free and available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, Solaris, QNX, OS/2, FreeBSD and BeOS. It's less popular, but fully featured, and its online documentation is better than that of Firefox or Internet Explorer. It has recently won a batch of awards for its mobile browser, Opera Mini. It has a better security track record than IE or Firefox, and will automatically import your IE bookmarks on install. Download it here. The online documentation is also, in my opinion, by far the best compared to the other free browsers and Internet Explorer. Have a look. Really, It makes my life easy...
Netscape: Netscape Navigator is free to download for windows. It is one of the longest running browsers, and the current version includes a very useful and free spyware removal tool - something that isn't included in the other browsers. It's online documentation is found here. The documentation is thorough but uninspiring.
Using Internet Explorer 7
Internet explorer can be found can be found on XP under Start->Programs->Internet explorer. The latest version is IE7, which comes with Windows Vista but is available for download here for Windows XP. Internet Explorer 7 is in an entirely new format to IE6, but don't worry, users familiar with IE6 can simply press the Alt key (to the left of the spacebar) on the keyboard to bring back the familiar toolbar.
Back & Forward
Starting from the top left, the back/forward arrows are probably the most used and most useful buttons in a browser. They enable you to skip forwards and backwards through web-pages you have already visted during a single session. Note that if you close your browser window, or open another one, back/forward will be greyed out until some new history is generated. To see a list of recently visited pages, press the little down arrow next to the forward button. You can then choose a page from the drop-down menu, instead of having to go back or forward through a number of pages.
The Address Bar
The address bar is where you type your internet addresses. There is no need to type the http:// prefix, so there's no need to remember it. If the site name is www.ikibits.co.uk for example, you can get away without the www bit as well! So typing http://www.ikibits.co.uk in the address bar and pressing return will display the same page as typing www.ikibits.co.uk or ikibits.co.uk.
For those more technically minded http is HypertextTransfer Protocol. You can also use the prefix ftp:// in a browser - File Transfer Protocol, commonly used for downloading files from specific sites, for example ftp://ftp.microsoft.com.
Next to the Address Bar is the Refresh Button (or indeed GO button), and the STOP button. You can also use F5 as a keyboard shortcut to refresh the screen. Refreshing is useful if the page seems to have problems loading or you want to refresh the content of a page that may have been cached (a copy of the page is stored by the browser so that the page need not be downloaded again - making for quicker browsing). The Stop button is useful for stopping annoying repetative GIF animations or background music, or stopping the page from loading any more content.
The Search Box
Now it used to be the case that in previous versions of internet explorer, you could simply put what you're looking for in the address box. There are a couple of problems with this, firstly its very irritating when a mis-spelled address (or URL - Uniform Resource Locator) results in time wasted looking for a search, and secondly it only used MSN (microsoft's search engine - no surprises there). The same is true for IE7.0, but the bonus is that you can much more easily specify which search engines it will refer to.
The little magnifying glass next to the search box is the "go" button to search, or you can just press enter or return. If you want to keep the page you are looking at and open the search in a new tab, hold down Alt and press enter or return. Note that pressing Alt on its own will toggle diplaying the old IE6 menu bar. Next to the magnifying glass is a little down arrow. This is where you can customise the search engine. The tick next to google shows that it is selected as my search engine. In order to add more search engines, or to choose your preferred provider, select "Find more providers..." from the drop down list. It opens a new page with a list of providers, but if it isn't listed and you know the internet address (URL) you can add your own.
Favourites / RSS Feeds / History - The Gold Star
Favourites
Beneath the back and forward arrows is the little gold star that symbolises "favourites". As you can see in the picture there are three Sub-menu's to choose from. Favourites gives you a list of sites and folders containing references to websites. In order to add a page to your favourites, you have to hold cntrl and press D on your keyboard. Try bookmarking this page, you will see that it appears in your favourites folder. The keyboard shortcut for opening your favourites is cntrl+I. Explore your favourites list by left clicking on folders to open them, and left click to close them. You can edit the favourites list using a right click - this enables you to cut/copy/past, create a folder, delete a bookmark and so fourth.
Next to the gold star, is a star with a plus. Left-click this to open the submenu. Here you can add a bookmark (cntrl+D) a page or group of pages (your open tabs), organise your favourites, and save a list of your favourites and/or cookies to your hard drive or import a list to your browser.
RSS Feeds
Next to the favourites button in the sub-menu is Feeds. RSS feeds allow you to quickly view a summary of additions and changes your favourite websites. In order for RSS to work, its usually a matter of clicking on the RSS icon on a web page. Sometimes this is called "subscribing" to a feed, but it doens't usually involve costing you anything!
History
The third menu displays your internet history - useful if you have forgotten to bookmark a site for example. The drop down arrow to the right of it allows you to change the various views - left click to activate. To close the favourites pane, left-click the gold star again.
Tabs
Tabs is a new feature for Internet Explorer 7, but had been around for some time in Firefox and Opera. Quick Tabs is a preview pane for the pages you have open in your browser window, left click the icon to activate it and left click again to close it. You can close open tabs in this view by left-clicking on the grey squares in the top right-hand coner of the pages in the preview pane. Tab list gives you a vertical list view of your open tabs. To open a new tab, simply click on the furthermost tab to the right or use cntrl+T. To close a tab, left click on the grey X on the right hand side of the tabs.
You can also use the right mouse button on a tab to perform similar functions - as pictured.
The Menu Icons
The final cluster to explore in my overview of Internet Explorer 7 are the menu icons. These icons are a direct replacement of the old menu bar using the familiar format File, Edit, View etc.. You can bring back the old menu style by pressing Alt once.
- Home - The home page or opening page for your browser. You can set your homepage by pressing the little down arrow to the right of the little house. You will need to know the web address of course.
- Print - Pretty self-explainatory. The little down arrow to the right of the print icon enables you to view a print preview. You can either print a whole page, or select parts of a page to print (by holding the left mouse button and dragging) then select print preview and in the middle drop down box select "as selected on the screen". This is a very useful feature.
- Font - Scales the fon-size from smallest to largest. Some poorly written websites do not allow you to scale the font.
- RSS - Displays the RSS feeds for the current page. This will only work for RSS enables websites, for example bbc.co.uk.
- Page - Opens another dropdown menu including Font, New Window, Save, Save As, Send page by e-mail, Send link by e-mail, Zoom, Encoding, and view source.
- Tools - Opens a sub-menu giving options for: Deleting browser history, managing your pop-up phishing (fraudulent sites try to get personal details from you in a variety of ways) and add-ons settings, work offline, windiws Update, the option to view in full-screen-mode F11, display the menu Alt, open the menu's available from pressing the gold star, and to set your internet connections.
Customising Internet Explorer 7
Customising Internet Explorer 7 is simple, but not something that is entirely obvious unless you've bored yourself reading the help section. Firstly you should be aware of the Alt key to bring up the alternate menu bar. F11 will display the page in full-screen mode. Press F11 again to return to normal mode. To bring up the customisation menu right click in the blank space between the tabs and the icons on the right.
- Menu Bar - The same as pressing Alt
- Links - Places the links toolbar in your browser window. Read more about the links toolbar here
- Status Bar - Toggles the Status bar at the bootom of the browser window on or off.
- Lock the toolbars - Takes away the little separator that you can drag left and right
- Use Large Icons
- Customise Command Bar - Allows you to add, remove and re-organise the icons to the right of the tabs. You can change the size of the icons, and add or remove the labels.
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