Internet Explorer 7 Is Not Your Father’s Web Browser

If you’re familiar with Internet Explorer 6 or previous Internet Explorer versions, you might be in for a shock when you first start Internet Explorer 7: Gone is the simplicity of the Internet Explorer you know, replaced with a more complicated user interface that mimics the look and feel of the Windows Explorer shell while providing onscreen real estate for all its new features. 17-1, Internet Explorer 7 is quite a bit busier looking than its predecessors. Explorer, but you may find it difficult to find features you were once used to. So what’s changed in the Internet Explorer 7 user interface? First, the menu bar is hidden and renamed to Classic Menu, similar to what happened with the menu bar in the Explorer shell. Microsoft says that it disabled the Classic Menu to reduce the clutter, but we think you’ll agree that the Internet Explorer 7 user interface is still quite a bit more cluttered than that of Internet Explorer 6. If you don’t like this design decision, you can temporarily cause the Internet Explorer 7 Classic Menu to appear by pressing the ALT key once. Or, you can simply click the new Tools toolbar icon and select Toolbars and then Classic Menus to enable this menu all the time. Various user interface elements have also been moved around to conform to the new Windows Vista common user interface style. The Back and Forward buttons are prominently featured in the upper left corner of the window next to the top-mounted address bar, for example. The main toolbar, now called the command bar, is now located way over to the far right of the window, causing the Home button to be located quite a ways from its previous location, which is sure to frustrate those who have committed the location of this commonly needed button to memory. You can easily resize the size of the command bar if you want to ensure that you can see all of its buttons. First, ensure that the toolbars are not locked by navigating to Tools -> Toolbars and unchecking Lock Bands (this option is unchecked by default). Then, you can drag the command bar left and right to resize it. If you make the command bar too short, a double chevron will appear at the right, indicating that you can reach the rest of its options via a drop-down menu, 17-2.

The Command Bar Love it or hate it, the new command bar houses some of Internet Explorer’s most commonly needed functionality. Table 17-1 explores the options you’ll see, from left to right, in this toolbar. All of these features are described in more detail later in this article. You can also customize which buttons appear in the Internet Explorer 7.0 command bar. To customize this toolbar, right-click one of the visible toolbar buttons and choose Customize. This will display the Customize Toolbar dialog box shown in article 17-3. You might use this dialog box to remove existing toolbar buttons you don’t want, or you can add optional buttons that don’t appear by default. Table 17-2 summarizes the optional buttons you can add to the Internet Explorer 7.0 command bar. Additionally, you can add one or more separators, which visually separate command bar buttons. Most of these features will be described later in this article. If you install software that adds a button to the Internet Explorer toolbar, that button will be added to the right side of the command bar now. For example, Windows Live Messenger installs a Messenger button, and Microsoft Office (2003 and newer) installs a Research button (and, if you’ve installed OneNote, a Send to OneNote button). You might see other similar buttons, depending on which software you’ve installed. Likewise, if you upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista, any buttons that were added to Internet Explorer 6 will show up in the Internet Explorer 7 command bar as well. You can remove these buttons via the Customize Toolbar dialog box described previously.

Where Is It Now? Hundreds of millions of people used to Internet Explorer 6 may be asking this question. Despite IE’s widespread use, Microsoft made some startling changes to the way Internet Explorer 7 works. With that in mind, Table 17-3 should help Internet Explorer 6–savvy users find their way around the new interface.

New Internet Explorer 7

Features and Functionality After you get over the new look of Internet Explorer you will discover that Microsoft has added a lot of new functionality to this release. Indeed, Internet Explorer is arguably the most dramatic upgrade in the history of Microsoft’s web browser. In this section, we’ll examine the biggest changes.

Manage Your Favorite Web Sites with Favorites Center In previous versions of Internet Explorer, the Favorites folder provided a place in the system where you could save links, or shortcuts, to your favorite web sites. Favorites were typically accessed in Internet Explorer via the Favorites menu. This tradition has changed somewhat in Internet Explorer 7. Now, Favorites are accessed via a new Favorites Center, which is basically an Explorer bar that can be triggered to appear on the left side of the browser window. You trigger the Favorites Center by clicking the yellow star icon, 17-4. The Favorites menu still exists in Internet Explorer 7, but you’ll have to display (or permanently enable) the Classic Menu in order to see it. To do so, tap the Alt key and choose Favorites. By default, Favorites Center appears in Favorites view, which displays your favorite web sites in a menu-like list. But don’t be concerned that Microsoft simply duplicated the functionality of the old Favorites menu and moved it to a new location in order to fool you. The Favorites Center includes far more functionality than the old Favorites menu. Favorites Center appears as a floating panel of sorts by default, but you can attach, or pin, it to the browser window by clicking the Pin button, which looks like a small door with a green arrow on it. Curiously, to close the Favorites Center when pinned, you need to click the Close Favorites Center button, which looks like a small black x and is found above, not within, the Favorites Center panel. To see what this means, enable the Favorites Center and mouse over the various folders and shortcuts you see in the list. If you mouse over a folder, a small blue arrow appears. If you click this arrow, you will open all of the shortcuts in that folder in their own tabs. (See the next section for more information about tabbed browsing if you don’t understand what this means.) Conversely, if you mouse over a shortcut, you’ll see a small red x appear. If you click this red x, the selected shortcut will be permanently deleted, with no warning dialog box. Naturally, if you click a shortcut, that shortcut will open in the current browser window. And if you click a folder, the view will expand to show you the contents of that folder, 17-5. In addition to containing links to your favorite web sites, the Favorites Center also includes views for History (your browser history) and something called Feeds. In this way, you might think of Favorites Center as the front end to the memory of Internet Explorer 7. Here’s how these two new buttons work:

Feeds: Contains RSS feeds to which you’ve subscribed. (We examine RSS feeds in detail later in this article.)

History: Shows you the web pages you visited in the past. When you click this button, a drop-down menu enables you to organize the list by various criteria and search your history for a previously viewed page.

Navigate the Web with Tabbed Browsing While opinions differ on which web browser first offered tabbed browsing, a feature that optionally lets the user open new web pages within the frame of a single browser window, and access each individual page via a series of visible tabs, one thing is very clear: Internet Explorer was the last major browser to get the feature. Now that Microsoft has finally caught up and added this crucial bit of browsing functionality to Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer is no longer a second-class web citizen. If you haven’t had the opportunity to use tabbed browsing, chances are you’ll appreciate the feature, especially if you tend to open a lot of web documents in different windows. Because you can now optionally open new web documents in a tab contained within a single browser window, you’ll have fewer windows to manage and less clutter on your desktop. Here’s how tabbed browsing works. By default, Internet Explorer opens with a single document loaded, as before. But now, each document Internet Explorer displays is contained within a tab. The top of the tab - the part that looks like an actual tabbed file folder - is found at the top of the browser window, below the address bar and to the right of the Favorites Center and Add/Subscribe buttons. If you choose to never deal with tabs per se, Internet Explorer will essentially act as it did before, except that you will see that single tab there near the top of the window. The beauty of tabbed browsing, however, is that you can open multiple tabs, which are essentially child windows of the main browser window. To open a new tab, click the New Tab button, which is the gray squared-shaped object to the right of the rightmost tab, 17-6. Although this isn’t documented, you can also open a new tab by double-clicking the blank area to the right of the New Tab button. By default, the new tab will open to a blank page and you’re good to go: You can enter a web address and navigate there, go directly to your home page, or perform any other similar navigational tasks. But there are better ways to open a new tab. You can use the Ctrl+T keyboard shortcut, for starters. This will open a new tab in a manner similar to clicking the New Tab button. But say you’re doing a Google search and you want to open links to certain search results in new tabs. (This, frankly, is a great use for tabbed browsing.) To open a link in a new tab, you can right-click the link and choose Open In New Tab, or Ctrl-click the link (that is, hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard while you click it). Alternatively, you can click the middle mouse button to open a new tab as well. This method is particularly effective when you have a list of hyperlinks that you want to open, all at the same time. You can simply move down the list, Ctrl-clicking as you go, and then casually examine each tab in order. That last bit brings up an interesting issue. How do you navigate between tabs? You may recall that you can navigate between open windows in Windows using the Alt+Tab key combination (or, starting in Windows Vista, the new 3D view, which is toggled by using the Windows Key+Tab key combination). In Internet Explorer 7, you can select an individual tab by clicking its tab button. But you can also use various key combinations to select tabs. To cycle through the available tabs, use the Ctrl+Tab key combination. Or, to move in reverse order, try Ctrl+Shift+Tab. To close a tab, click the Close Tab button - which appears as a small x on the tab button of each tab. Or, use the Ctrl+W keyboard shortcut. Note that Internet Explorer will prompt you now if you attempt to close the entire browser window if two or more tabs are open: 17-7, closing down multiple tabs (that is, open documents) with a single mouse click could be disastrous, so this is a nice feature

Quick Tabs Although other browsers have had tabbed browsing functionality for years, Internet Explorer 7 is the first to utilize an innovative new tabbed browsing feature called Quick Tabs. Quick Tabs are a visual way of managing the open tabs you have in any Internet Explorer 7 window, and it’s likely that you’ll be quite taken with it. To understand why Quick Tabs is so cool, you’ll have to open a number of web pages in different tabs in Internet Explorer 7. When you are displaying two or more tabs in an Internet Explorer browser window, you’ll notice that a new icon appears next to the Favorites Center and Add to Favorites icons. This icon enables you to use Quick Tabs; it resembles four squares. When you click the Quick Tabs icon, the document contained in each tab will be tiled in a thumbnail view within the main browser window 17-8. To select a particular tab from this display, simply click any of the thumbnails. That page will jump to the front and Internet Explorer will return to its normal display. The Quick Tab icon also provides a drop-down menu. When you select this menu, you’ll see a list of the available documents. You can jump to a particular tab by selecting any of the choices, and the currently displayed tab is displayed in bold type.

Using Multiple Home Pages You may recall that previous Internet Explorer versions enabled you to specify any web document as your home page, which is displayed when the browser is launched. In Internet Explorer 7, you can assign multiple documents as your home page. Each document opens in its own tab. This concept is similar to that of a tab group, which is portrayed in the Favorites menu or Favorites view of the Favorites Center as a folder full of links. So your home page can be a single page, like before, or it can be a folder full of links, or a tab group. To assign multiple web documents as your home page, you must first load each of the documents you want into Internet Explorer. Then, click the Tools button and select Internet Options to display the Internet Options dialog box. In the Home page section at the top of the General tab, click the Use Current button. You’ll see that all of the open documents in the current browser window are added to the list. You can also come back later and add or remove documents from the list. To add a document while keeping all of the other documents, first load the document you want to add. Then, select all of the web address in the browser’s address bar and copy it to the Clipboard (by clicking Ctrl+C or right-clicking and choosing Copy). Then, select Tools and then Options, and click inside the list of web addresses you see in the Home Page section of the General tab. 17-9, you can edit this list as if it were any text file. Paste the contents of the Clipboard into a new line of the list to add it to the list of home pages. You can delete particular home pages in a similar fashion. Simply open the Internet Options dialog and edit the list, removing the pages you no longer want.

Integrated Web Search In previous versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft built in very basic web search features, but the company has been busy advancing the state of the art in web search in other products since Internet Explorer 6, including a variety of MSN and Windows Live toolbars, its MSN Search and Windows Live Search services, and its index-based desktop search technologies, which are included in Windows Vista. In Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft has finally added integrated web search functionality to its browser. It’s pretty obvious, too: A search box sits prominently in the top-right corner of the browser window, to the right of the address bar and Refresh and Stop buttons. What’s not obvious is how powerful this feature is and how easily it can be configured to your needs. Before getting to that, think about how web search worked in Internet Explorer 6. Basically, you could navigate to a web search engine, such as Google (www.google.com) or, if you were savvy enough, you could utilize the autosearch feature in Internet Explorer 6 to search the Web directly from the address bar. This functionality still works in Internet Explorer 7: If you click the browser’s address bar and enter text that can’t be resolved as a URL, or prepend the text with a question mark (the ? character), Internet Explorer will search the Web for the text you entered. By default, it uses MSN Search, but you can configure the browser to use different search providers. In Internet Explorer 7, you don’t have to know about this secret because the search box is built right into the browser and is displayed by default. To search in Internet Explorer 7, simply select the search box, type a search query, and tap Enter (or press the Search button, which resembles a magnifying glass). The search box displays the name of the default search provider - again, MSN Search by default - in light gray text just so you know what it will use.

Specifying a Different Search Provider But you don’t have to use Microsoft’s search engine. If you’re a Google fan, for example, you can use Google instead. To select Google as the default search provider, click the Search Options button (the small arrow to the right of Search) and select Search Google. Now, all of your searches - including autosearch from the Internet Explorer address bar - will use Google instead of MSN Search, 17-10. Microsoft also built in a way for users and other search engines to add their own providers into Internet Explorer 7 so you can use any web search service you’d like. To select from a list of search providers, click Search Options and then select Find More Providers. This will launch a Microsoft web page called the Windows Search that includes a list of search providers, including popular favorites like AOL and Yahoo!, as well as topic searches such as Amazon.com, ESPN, Wal-Mart, and even Weather.com. There’s something for everyone. You can even add other providers to the site if you’d like.

Using Find in Page In addition to searching the Web, the Internet Explorer 7.0 search functionality also enables you to search the text within a currently loaded document. This is handy when you search the Web for a specific term and then load a page that contains the text, but is quite long. Instead of reading the entire document, you can search within the document for your search string. This feature is called Find in Page. To access Find in Page, you must first load a web document. This can be something you searched for, or it can be any web page anywhere on the Web. Then, enter a search string in the Internet Explorer search box as you would normally. However, instead of tapping Enter or hitting search, click the Search Options button and select Find In Page. This will trigger the Find dialog, which auto-fills to include the text in the search box. Click the Find Next button to begin searching.