Working with the Internet Explorer 7 Display In previous versions of Internet Explorer, the way text was displayed in the browser was dependent on various factors, including whether you had enabled ClearType (in Windows XP only), a display mode that triples the vertical resolution of text only via a technology called sub-pixel rendering. Most people find ClearType to be hugely beneficial on LCD displays, but many complain that it makes text look fuzzy on older CRT-type monitors. In Internet Explorer 7, ClearType is always enabled by default. However, if you find that the display is blurry on your monitor, you can turn it off. To turn off ClearType, open Internet Options and navigate to the Advanced tab. In the Settings list, scroll down to the Multimedia section. Then, deselect the option titled Always Use ClearType for HTML and restart the browser. Problem solved.

Configuring Text Size and Page Zoom Before Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft’s browsers offered only rudimentary text-sizing capabilities. Although you would typically view the text in a given web page at 100 percent magnification, Internet Explorer also offered a Text Size option that enabled you to navigate between choices such as Largest, Larger, Medium (the default), Smaller, and Smallest. These choices still exist in Internet Explorer 7, and if you’re happy with them feel free to continue using them. However, they’re hidden by default, since the Internet Explorer menu is hidden. To display the menu, tap the Alt key and select Text Size from the View menu. That said, you’re going to want to skip the Internet Explorer Text Size options and utilize the new Page Zoom feature instead. Unlike the Text Size options, Page Zoom works by retaining the underlying design of the web page you’re viewing. That is, it doesn’t just increase or decrease the size of text, which often blows away the underlying layout design. Instead, Page Zoom intelligently zooms the entire page display, including both graphics and text, all the while improving the readability of the text and retaining wonderful graphical image quality as well. The Page Zoom user interface is located in the bottom right of the browser window, at the far right of the status bar. There, you’ll see a small magnifying glass icon with the text 100% next to it (by default). When you click the small arrow to the right of this icon or text, a pop-up menu appears, 17-11, letting you choose from various zoom amounts. You can also simply click the Page Zoom icon to jump between preset page zoom values of 100 percent, 125 percent, and 150 percent. What you’ll notice is that the graphics look quite good as they’re resized. But the text is simply phenomenal looking. No matter how much you zoom in, the text looks impressive, 17-12.

Browsing in Full-Screen Mode Like its predecessors, Internet Explorer 7 supports a full-screen browsing mode in which Internet Explorer covers the entire display, including the Windows Vista task bar. To enable full-screen mode, tap F11 or choose Full Screen from the Tools menu. By default, full-screen mode even hides the Internet Explorer toolbars, so you can literally use the entire system display to read the current Web page, 17-13. To display the Internet Explorer toolbars in full-screen mode, simply move your mouse to the top of the screen. The toolbars will slide in with an animated effect.

Printing Anyone who has tried to print a web page with Internet Explorer knows how poorly that feature works. Well, take heart: Microsoft has not just fixed printing in Internet Explorer 7, removing problems that existed in previous versions, such as the way that the rightmost third of most page printouts would simply disappear off the side of the page. Now, in Internet Explorer 7, printing is actually a positive experience. It’s been thoroughly overhauled. You’ll access most printing features directly through the Print button, which is found in the Internet Explorer command bar. If you just click the Print button, a standard Windows Print dialog box will appear, just as it would in any other application. From here, you can select a printer, and configure other system-wide printing options. However, the Print button also offers a drop-down menu from which you can access additional functionality, including Print Preview and Page Setup. Both are dramatic improvements over previous Internet Explorer versions.

Using Print Preview When you select the Print Preview option from the Print button drop-down menu, you’ll see the Print Preview display shown in article 17-14. From here, you can switch between portrait and landscape display modes, access the Page Setup dialog, and perform other printing-related tasks. The biggest change from Internet Explorer 6 is that you can now easily toggle whether each page includes footer and headers. To see how this works, click the Turn Headers And Footers On or Off button and see how it changes the display in Print Preview. You can also display the pages to print in various ways. For example, you can display an entire page in the window, fit the display to the width of the window, or even display multiple pages 17-15. When you’re ready to print, click the Print button at the bottom of the Print Preview window. Or, click Close to return to Internet Explorer.

Print Preview of Selected Content Another truly amazing feature is that you can print, and print preview, only the content you’ve selected in a web page. That is, you don’t have to print an entire web page. Instead, you can print that text that you’ve selected, or highlighted. To see how this works, open a web document and select some text. Then, choose the Print Preview option from the Print button drop-down menu. When the Print Preview window comes up, you’ll see a new Select Content drop-down menu in the middle top of the window, 17-16. Open the drop-down list and choose As Selected On Screen. Now, only the selected text is ready to print.

Using Page Setup If you want even more fine-grain control over how your web pages will print, you can use the Page Setup dialog box. This dialog box can be accessed in two ways: through the Page Setup button in the Print Preview toolbar, or through the Page Setup option in the Print button’s drop-down menu. This dialog box, shown in article 17-17, enables you to configure the paper size and source, the margin sizes, and also the text strings used to configure the header and footer display. By default, the Header text string is set to

&w&bPage &p of &P, which looks like a bunch of gooblygook until you realize that each of those characters has meaning. The

& character is used to denote a header or footer variable. So

&w is a variable, which happens to stand for window title. In previous versions of Internet Explorer, you had to use the Page Setup dialog box to remove headers and footers from the printout. This method still works, though the Print Preview method described previously is simpler and quicker. To remove the header completely, simply select the Header text box and delete all of the text.

Covering Your Tracks Although it was possible to perform housekeeping tasks such as removing temporary Internet files and cookies and deleting your browser history, and saved form data and passwords, Internet Explorer 7 now offers an incredibly handy front end for doing this all with the single click of your mouse button. The feature is called Delete Browsing History, and it’s a nifty addition. Shown in article 17-18, Delete Browsing History enables you to delete temporary Internet files, cookies, browser history, saved form data, or saved passwords individually or all at the same time using the Delete All button. It’s a one-stop shop for covering your tracks. Here’s what each of the options means.

Temporary Internet Files: These are downloaded files that have been cached in your Temporary Internet Files folder, including Offline Favorites and attachments stored by Microsoft Outlook.

Cookies: These are small text files that include data that persists between visits to particular web sites.

History: This is the list of web sites you’ve visited with Internet Explorer and the web addresses you’ve typed in the Windows Vista Run dialog box.

Form Data: Information that’s been saved using the Internet Explorer’s autocomplete form data functionality.

Passwords: Passwords that were saved using Internet Explorer autocomplete password data functionality. One feature Microsoft didn’t improve in Internet Explorer 7 is its handling of web downloads. Users of other browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, are used to more sophisticated download managers, which can pause downloads midstream and resume them later. Microsoft has pledged to improve Internet Explorer more rapidly than it did in the past, and we’ve been told that the company will look at including a full-featured download manager in a future Internet Explorer version.

Understanding and Using RSS Although much of the World Wide Web is based on a rather passive system where users manually browse to the web sites they’d like to visit, a new type of web technology, called Really Simple Syndication (RSS), has turned that paradigm on its head and changed the way many people consume web-based information. In keeping with this sea change, Internet Explorer 7 supports RSS, letting Windows Vista users access web-based content in both traditional and modern ways. So what is RSS? Basically, it’s a data format, based on XML, designed for distributing news and other web-based content via the Internet. Content that is available via RSS is said to be published in RSS format, while applications (like Internet Explorer) that can access RSS content are said to subscribe to that content. What makes RSS different from traditional web browsing is that RSS applications periodically poll the content publishers to which you’ve subscribed. So if you subscribe to the RSS feed, as such a link is called, to a particular web site, that feed will be updated on your local machine periodically, assuming you have an Internet connection. Most good RSS applications, including Internet Explorer 7, allow you to specify how often feeds are updated. Some feeds, obviously, are updated more often than others. The Internet Explorer RSS functionality is exposed in a number of ways. The Internet Explorer 7 command bar has a prominent orange Feeds button, which provides an obvious front end to this technology. (The Feeds button is grayed out if you are currently visiting a web page with which there is no RSS feed associated, however.) So you must visit a site with an RSS feed to discover how it works.

Viewing an RSS Feed As an example, take a look at the CNN web site. CNN, a major news site, does indeed have an RSS feed, as indicated by the orange color of the Internet Explorer Feeds button. To view the feed, simply click the button. Internet Explorer will switch to its new feed reading page, which displays the content of the CNN feed (in this case) in the vaguely pleasant, if bland, style shown in article 17-19. In the Feed Reading Page view, you can perform various actions, including searching the feed for specific text using the search box in the upper-right corner of the page, or sorting by date (the default) or title. The CNN feed publishes only the title and a small abstract for each article it lists. So if you want to view a full article, you must click on the title for the article you’d like to read. Some feeds publish entire articles directly in the feed, so you don’t have to manually visit the main web site.

Subscribing to an RSS Feed In this view, you’re essentially just browsing the Web as before, albeit through a nonstandard display. But the real power of RSS feeds comes when you subscribe. To subscribe to the CNN feed, you simply click the Subscribe To This Feed link at the top of the page. When you do so, the Subscribe To This Feed dialog box appears, 17-20. Here, you can edit the name of the Feed, where it will be created (the Feeds folder, by default), and whether to automatically download any files that might be attached to the feed. Some web sites include two or more RSS feeds. If this is the case, you can display the list of available feeds by clicking the small arrow at the right of the Feeds button. Then, simply choose the feed you want. When you’ve subscribed, the feed-reading page changes to indicate that you’ve successfully subscribed to the feed. Additionally, you may see an alert noting that automatic feed updates are turned off. If you see this alert, your RSS subscriptions will not be updated automatically. To enable this functionality, click the Turn On Automatic Feed Updates link.

Managing RSS Feeds Internet Explorer treats RSS subscriptions much like Favorites. However, RSS subscriptions are not stored in your Favorites folder. Instead, they are stored in a special database that is based on the RSS platform technologies built into Windows Vista. You access your subscribed feeds through the Favorites Center. You may recall from our discussion earlier in this article that Feeds, like Favorites and History lists, are stored in this browser memory. If you open the Favorites Center, you’ll see that CNN has been added to the Feeds view, which is shown in article 17-21. As with your Favorites list, you can do a few interesting things with RSS feeds in the Favorites Center. When you mouse over a feed in the list of subscribed feeds, you’ll see a small refresh icon appear. If you click this icon, the feed will manually be updated if there is any new content to download. If you simply click the feed name, the feed will be displayed in the feed reading page as you’d expect.

RSS Is a Platform One of the more interesting things about the RSS support in Internet Explorer 7 is that it’s based on a much wider RSS platform that is available to any application running in Windows Vista. This means that third-party applications can access the RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to in Internet Explorer and provide you with even more advanced functionality. To see an example of what’s possible, check out the RSS Feeds gadget for the Windows Sidebar. We examine that feature in Article 6.

Internet Explorer 7 Keyboard Shortcuts Keyboard shortcuts make it possible to navigate the Internet Explorer user interface without having to move a hand over to the mouse. Internet Explorer 7 supports virtually all of the keyboard shortcuts supported by Internet Explorer 6, but it also adds a slew of new shortcuts related to new functionality in this version. Table 17-5 summarizes the Internet Explorer 7 keyboard shortcuts It’s worth noting that other browsers support a much wider range of these mouse actions, which are typically called mouse gestures, or simply gestures, outside of Microsoft. Fortunately, some intrepid developers have released a handy plug-in for Internet Explorer 7 that adds far more mouse actions to the browser. So head on over to The Code Project (www.codeproject.com/atl/MouseGestures.asp) if you think this will enhance your productivity. This is Internet Explorer we’re talking about, so you might be wondering where you can find a discussion of Internet Explorer 7 security features. Have no fear: Internet Explorer 7 includes a huge number of security-related features, and they’re all covered in Article 8.

Summary Internet Explorer 7 is a huge advance over previous versions, with major functional advances. Although we might debate whether the user interface changes will make Internet Explorer 7 harder to use, it’s hard to argue the other features Microsoft has added: Tabbed browsing and Quick Tabs, Favorites Center, integrated web search, the browser’s vastly improved text display and printing functionality, and its history-hiding techniques are all wonderful advancements. Internet Explorer 7 integration with RSS is also a positive sign: This standards-based web technology is sweeping across the Internet, enabling everything from blogs to podcasts. For once, Internet Explorer is on the cusp of the next big thing.