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| 75 Secrets Of Internet Pros |
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Featured Articles March 2000 • Vol.11 Issue 3 Page(s) 40-41 in print issue |
75 Secrets Of Internet Pros Web Browsers: Sharpen Your Surfing Skills | ||
 Experts in many fields are tight-lipped with their secrets, so getting one to share the tactics that make them so proficient at what they do is a major coup. Many of us have learned that even when experts agree to let you watch them work, the observations may not be very educational. This is especially true when you're dealing with accomplished computer users. Their hands fly around the keyboard and mouse, clicking here, typing a code there, and mixing a few hotkey combinations into the rapid-fire routine. Where did that dialog box come from? How did you get around typing the whole command? Trying to glean useful tips from the session can be like trying to learn magic while watching David Copperfield produce a dove from his sleeve. The printed page is friendlier to students because it lets them slow down the masters' moves to a more understandable pace. This month's feature package presents 75 of the best tricks Internet experts count on to save time and work more intelligently. You'll discover new ways to find the best price for items sold online, keep e-mail messages confidential, pinpoint the cause of your slow Internet connection, and more. Before you start reading, however, make a mental note about how you currently work while surfing the Web. That way, you can amaze yourself in a few days by measuring just how effectively you've progressed at getting things done online. Surfing the Web has become a national pastime, so to help you pass your time on the Internet more efficiently, we've come up with a list of tips that will have you browsing like a pro in no time.  I Need My Space Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) has a handy keystroke that lets you quickly display full-screen Web pages. With a Web page open, place the mouse pointer anywhere on the page, click the F11 key on the keyboard, and watch as the page takes over the entire screen. When you want to get back to the way things were, just click the F11 key again. Location, Location, Location Desktop real estate is precious, so make the most of space by only displaying the toolbars you want. Under the View menu in both IE and Netscape Navigator, use the first menu item (Toolbars or Show) and a submenu selection to hide unnecessary toolbars. Give yourself more space by eliminating IE's Radio toolbar and Navigator's Personal toolbar. Who Chooses The Buttons? You can control which buttons are on your browser's toolbars. For IE, click View, Toolbars, and Customize to add and remove icons; eliminate text labels; and reduce the size of icons. Navigator users can change how icons and their text descriptions appear (via Edit, Preferences, Appearance) and the order in which buttons on the Personal toolbar are shown by dragging the icons from one place to another. Navigator users can also choose which buttons are visible on the toolbar by clicking the Bookmarks button; selecting Edit Bookmarks; highlighting the site; and clicking File, Add Selection To Toolbar. There's No Place Like Home You can also control which Web site appears when you click the Home button on your main toolbar. If you use Navigator, click Edit, Preferences, and the Navigator category and then type the universal resource locator (URL, a Web address) for the site you want the Home button to display. If you use IE, click Tools, Internet Options, and the General tab to designate the home page. Multitask Your Surfing Do you know that you can view two or more Web browser windows at once? Open your browser, click File, New, and Window or Navigator Window. You can toggle back and forth between browser windows by clicking the buttons on the Taskbar. Or, hold down the ALT key and press TAB to toggle between open application windows. Get Organized You probably know that you can save favorite sites via the bookmarks (Navigator) or favorites (IE) features, but you may not have discovered how easy it is to organize these sites into folders. In Navigator, click the Bookmarks button, then Edit Bookmarks to create folders (File, New Folder) and move items within these folders. In IE, click Favorites and Organize Favorites to accomplish the same tasks. Learn From Your History If you forgot to bookmark a site, don't worry, you can probably find it again using the History feature. Browsers let you view a list of recently visited sites, even if you neglected to add them to your bookmarks or favorites. View the History file in Navigator by clicking Communicator, Tools, and History. In IE, click the History icon from the main toolbar. Erase The Past Browsers make copies of the sites you visit and place them on your hard drive. These files can clog up your system, though, so clean them out occasionally. In Navigator, click Edit, Preferences, Advanced, Cache, and clear both the memory and disk cache. In IE, click View, Internet Options, the General tab, and click the Delete Files button. Skip Backwards While surfing, you might want to backtrack to a previous site. Rather than hitting the Back button numerous times until you arrive at the desired page, right-click the Back button for a list of recently visited sites. Then click the listing you want, and the site will display in your browser window. (This also works with the Forward button.) Get Help Finally, if you want more tips or help using your browser, place the mouse pointer anywhere on a Web page and press the F1 key. This displays the browser's Help file. (Or, access http://www.smartcomputing.com/mar00/browser to find more of these tips on our Web site.) Can't We All Just Get Along? Despite the browser war between Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape Navigator, the two browsers can peacefully co-exist on one computer. If you like one browser and your spouse prefers another, or if you use one browser for work and the other for personal business, you can install both on the same computer. Just launch one browser, go to the Web site of the other company (http://www.microsoft.com or http://home.netscape.com/computing/download), and follow the instructions for downloading and installing the other company's browser software. Do More Browsers aren't just for Web surfing anymore. On newer systems, Web browser users can also use this application for browsing a computer's hard drive. In the Location bar or Address bar, try typing C:\My Documents for a partial list of files on your PC. (Or if you don't have Windows 98, just type C:\.) Take Notes Navigator includes a handy feature for typing notes to yourself about bookmarked sites so you'll never have to remember a bookmarked site's username and password again. Click the Bookmarks button, choose Edit Bookmarks, and then highlight the desired site. Next, right-click the site, select Bookmark Properties, and type in anything you'd like in the Description field. Multiply Your Settings You can configure both Navigator and IE for multiple individuals, allowing things such as multiple sets of bookmarked sites. Navigator users need to close the Navigator window, select Programs from the Windows Start menu, then click Netscape Communicator, Utilities, and User Profile Manager. If you use IE, select Settings from the Start menu, click Control Panel, and click the Users icon to select the items you want to personalize, including the Favorites folder. Safety Check Some Web sites offer secure connections to the Internet; that is, the information passed back and forth between you and the site is encrypted to keep it safe from prying eyes. You can tell whether a site is secure by looking at the bottom of your Web browser for an icon resembling a padlock. If it's there, and the lock is closed, the site is relatively safe. Keep The Kids Safe IE offers a tool, the Content Advisor, that allows you to set limits on what others who use the computer can see. If you use your computer at home and children have access to it, you might want to adjust the ratings settings to determine what types of content (language, nudity, sex, and violence) other users can see. To enable the Content Advisor, click Tools, Internet Options, and the Content tab and select the Enable button. Know Where You're Going Before you head off to an unknown area via a link on a Web page, place the mouse pointer over the link and look at the bottom of the Web browser window. Do you see the universal resource locator (URL, Web address) listed in the Status bar? This tells you whether the link leads you to another site or if you're merely visiting an internal page. This feature is especially useful when viewing a lengthy list of search results because the domain name might give you an idea about whether the link really leads to a site you want to visit. Untie The Phone Line With IE, you don't have to be connected to the Internet to see Web pages; you can easily download them to your computer and view them later, such as when using a laptop while traveling on a plane. The Web pages won't be live; that is, you won't see any changes made since you last logged off, but you can still read news articles, review closing stock prices, and more. One way to do this is to mark a site as an IE Favorite, choose Organize Favorites from the Favorite menu, highlight a site, right-click, and select Make Available Offline. Before logging off, click Tools and Synchronize. Then, when you're ready to view the sites, open the browser window and choose File, Work Offline. Stay Up-To-Date Make sure you have an up-to-date version of a Web browser by clicking Help, About (Communicator or Internet Explorer) and checking your version number against the software's latest version number (which you'll find on the Netscape or Microsoft Web site). If you're not using a current version, you might be missing some important new features.  by Heidi V. Anderson |
