Browsing the Web with Internet Explorer 7

Windows Vista features a brand-new and much-improved version of the Internet Explorer Web browser called Internet Explorer 7. As with previous Windows versions, Internet Explorer 7 is integrated into Windows Vista, although Microsoft offers a free download of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP as well. But here’s one reason to upgrade to Windows Vista: The version of Internet Explorer 7 found in Microsoft’s latest operating system is actually much more secure than the XP version and even offers a few unique features.

What Happened To say that Internet Explorer has an ignoble history is perhaps an understatement. Originally conceived as a minor add-on for Windows 95 and one that did not ship in the initial version of that Windows release, Internet Explorer later became the linchpin of Microsoft’s strategy for competing in the dot-com era and, not surprisingly, the subject of antitrust legal battles that continue to this day. Inexplicably, Microsoft melded Internet Explorer into Windows beginning with Windows 98, and designed the system in such a way that Internet Explorer could not be easily removed from the operating system (OS). This intermingling of web browser and OS code led to years and years of security problems, some of which eventually forced Microsoft to delay the release of Windows Vista simply so that it could ensure that its Internet Explorer– riddled operating systems were shored up with additional defenses. Worst of all, after Microsoft won the browser wars in the early 2000s, displacing competitors such as Netscape and Opera, the company lost interest in Internet Explorer and stopped active development of the browser. It even briefly considered removing Internet Explorer from Windows Vista altogether, relegating its web browsing duties to the Explorer shell, which as you probably know is simply based on Internet Explorer code anyway. Then a wonderful thing happened. A scrappy group of upstarts from The Mozilla Foundation (since renamed to The Mozilla Corporation) took the vestiges of the software code from Netscape’s browser and reconstituted it as a small, lean, and powerful browser named Firefox. Roaring out of the gates in 2004, Firefox quickly began seizing market share from Internet Explorer, thanks to its unique new features and functionality. And suddenly, Microsoft was interested in updating Internet Explorer once again. It’s amazing what a little competition can do. Starting with the Service Pack 2 (SP2) version of Windows XP, Microsoft re-established its Internet Explorer team and began working actively on new features. Although the version of Internet Explorer 6 that appeared in Windows XP SP2 was focused largely on security features, a future version, Internet Explorer 7, would include a huge number of functional improvements, aimed at closing the gap with Firefox and giving Microsoft’s customers reasons not to switch. For the first time in several years, Internet Explorer is a compelling web browser again, and it’s likely that most Windows Vista users will want to use this product to browse the Web and access other web-based content. Truth be told, we both prefer and recommend Mozilla Firefox over Internet Explorer, although we admit that the latest Internet Explorer version does indeed include a number of new and interesting features. You can find out more about Firefox from the Mozilla Web site (www.mozilla.com/).

Basic Internet Explorer Usage Although it’s unlikely that Windows Secrets readers are unaware of basic Internet Explorer features, many of you may have moved along to Mozilla Firefox or other browsers over the past few years. If that’s the case, this section will serve as a nice refresher.

Starting Internet Explorer Click the Internet Explorer icon in your Start Menu to start Internet Explorer. You can also start the Internet Explorer by clicking the Internet Explorer icon in the Quick Start toolbar. In previous version of Windows, you could type a web address (a URL) in the Address bar of any Explorer window and press Enter to change the Explorer window into an instance of Internet Explorer. This no longer works in Windows Vista: Now, when you type a web address into an Explorer address bar and tap Enter, a new Internet Explorer window opens. You can display the Internet Explorer icon on your desktop, although the process has changed. To do so, right-click an empty area of the desktop and choose Personalize. Then, in the Personalization window, select the Change Desktop Icons link on the left side of the window. In the Desktop Icon Settings window that appears, check Internet Explorer and click OK.

New Link, New Window If you want to open a new window when you jump to a new site, hold down the Shift key when you click the link. (If you prefer, you can right-click the link and then click Open In New Window to do the same thing without using the keyboard.) You’ll then be able to see both the target site and the source page in different Internet Explorer windows. You can also choose to use Internet Explorer’s new tabbed browsing feature instead. We describe this feature later in the article.

Managing Downloads from the Internet Like previous versions of Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 7 does not provide a download manager. Instead, it provides only basic functions for downloading files from Internet servers. Each time you click a link to download a file with Internet Explorer, you get a new download dialog.

Edit on the Internet Explorer Toolbar Unlike previous Internet Explorer versions, Internet Explorer 7 doesn’t include an Edit button on its command bar by default. If you don’t have the Edit button and wish you did, here’s how to get it:

1. Click the Tools button in the Internet Explorer toolbar.

2. Scroll down to Toolbars and then select Customize.

3. In the Customize Toolbar dialog box, select Edit from the Available Toolbar Buttons field and then click the Add button.

4. Click Close.

The Complete AutoComplete Internet Explorer has a feature called AutoComplete that helps you complete your entry in the address bar as soon as you type in the first few letters. For example, type

www.appl, pause for a few seconds, and you’ll get a drop-down list of sites you have previously visited that start with

www.appl, including

www.apple.com/. Even if there is a long list of URLs that start with the same letters that you’ve typed, you can easily use your mouse or arrow keys to scroll to and highlight an entry in the list, and then press Enter or Tab to jump to the site. If you press Alt+down arrow or F4 when the address bar is active, Internet Explorer displays a drop-down list of complete addresses you’ve recently typed in the address bar. This is a totally different list than the AutoComplete drop-down list; it is the same list that appears when you click the down arrow at the right end of the address bar. To enable or disable AutoComplete, choose Tools -> Internet Options, click the Content tab, and click the Settings button in the AutoComplete section. In the AutoComplete Settings dialog box, you can choose whether to use AutoComplete for Web addresses, forms, or user names and passwords. You can save time when typing Web addresses by making Internet Explorer automatically preface your entry with

www. and end it with the suffix

.com. Just type the domain name in the address bar and then press Ctrl+Enter. For example, type

windowssecrets, press Ctrl+Enter, and you get

www.WindowsSecrets.com. This is different from actually searching on the Internet for the address; see the “Autosearch for a Web Address” section later in this article for more on that.

Finding Web Sites Do you want to find a specific web site, or text from a specific web page? In an Internet Explorer window, click the address bar, type

find,

search, or

?, type a space, and then type the name of the company or organization whose site you want to find. If the name has a space in it, forget typing the

find,

search, or

?, and just put double quote marks around the name. You can also just type in any word, and the search function will be started. This will automatically start a search for the company, word in a Web page, or organization on Live.com. We discuss changing your search options later in this article.

Autosearch for a Web Address Internet Explorer will automatically search on the Internet for a Web address if you ask it to. Type a fragment of an address in the Address bar, press Enter, and Internet Explorer will treat the fragment as a search term. After a minute or two, you’ll see a list of URLs containing the text you typed. You can choose to turn this feature off or change how it functions by taking these steps:

1. Click Tools -> Internet Options.

2. Click the Advanced tab and scroll down to Search From The Address Bar.

3. Select the option that you prefer - Do Not Search From The Address Bar or Just Display The Results In The Main Window - and then click OK. It isn’t the default, so you might miss it. Internet Explorer will not put in placeholder borders for images yet to be downloaded. If you want this feature turned on so that the text can wrap around the images as yet unseen, you can turn it on in your Internet Options dialog box. Choose Tools -> Internet Options, click the Advanced tab, and scroll down to Multimedia. Mark the Show Image Download Placeholders check box. Click OK.

Copy and Paste Links Wherever there’s a hot link, there’s a way to cut and paste it. If you receive an e-mail message in Windows Mail that contains a link, you can of course just click it to invoke an Internet Explorer window (if it’s a link to a web site or an FTP address). You can right-click a link and click Copy Shortcut. Then paste this URL into the address bar, into a text file, onto the Desktop - whatever you like. You can also click Add To Favorites instead of Copy Shortcut. Right-click a web page name in your History Explorer bar, and you can click Copy or Add To Favorites. You can do the same with a web page name in search results displayed in the Search Explorer bar.

Toggle Internet Explorer between Full-Screen Mode and Restore Open up Internet Explorer and press the F11 key. If you weren’t before, you are now in full-screen mode. If you were maximized before, pressing F11 again will get you back there.

Favorites and Offline Web Pages A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is a unique identifier for a web page or other resource on the Internet. Windows maintains a list of the URLs for your favorite sites. Your favorites are actually shortcuts stored in the Favorites folder. You can store whatever you like in the Favorites subfolders, but we suggest limiting what you put in these folders to shortcuts (either to URLs or to other folders or documents). You can put copies of URL shortcuts on your Desktop and start your Internet Explorer by clicking a shortcut’s icon.

To create a shortcut to your favorites, open an Explorer window and navigate to Favorites in your Home folder. Right-drag and drop your Favorites folder onto your Desktop. Choose Create Shortcut(s) Here. You can get to your favorites from the new Favorites Center as well, which we discuss later in the article.

URL Shortcuts Internet Explorer keeps track of web sites using shortcuts to URLs. These shortcuts have an extension of

url instead of the standard

lnk extension for Windows shortcuts. URL shortcuts store more information about the URLs than just their values. Internet Explorer uses this additional information to help you manage your shortcuts as well as to enable you to view web sites offline. You can see this information by right-clicking a URL shortcut in Windows Explorer and choosing Properties. You can create a URL shortcut to a web site just by displaying the site in an Internet Explorer window, and clicking the new Add To Favorites button. We discuss this new functionality later in this article. If you would rather put the shortcut directly on the Desktop, right-click an area on the web page that doesn’t include a graphic or a link to another location and choose Create Shortcut from the context menu. You can also drag the icon at the left end of the address bar to the desktop to create a shortcut to the web page. To create a shortcut to a link (a jump to another URL) in a web page, drag the link to the desktop. You can later click this shortcut to open an Internet Explorer window and go to the indicated location on the Web. You don’t have to put URL shortcuts in the Favorites folder or one of its subfolders. If you do, then the shortcuts are accessible from the Favorites Center. But you are free to put them wherever you like. You can create many folders of URL shortcuts, and place shortcuts to these folders on your desktop.

Saving Graphics off the Internet Do you want to save a web-based graphic that you are viewing in Internet Explorer? Right-click it, choose Save Picture As (sometimes you will see Save Background As as well), and then give it a path and a name. If you don’t save a graphics file as you’re viewing it, you can save it later from the cache. When Internet Explorer first downloads a graphics file, it automatically caches (saves) it in the Temporary Internet Files folder. You can find the file in this folder and save it permanently by copying it to another location. If you want to turn a graphic in a web page into wallpaper on your desktop, right-click the graphic and choose Set As Wallpaper.

Saving Complete Web Pages Saving a web page as an HTML file in Internet Explorer usually saves only the text and layout of the page - the graphics are saved separately as links. However, Internet Explorer does have the ability to save a web page as a single document. The MIME HTML (.mht) file format incorporates both the graphics and the HTML text on a web page into one file. The graphics are encoded using MIME (and Uuencoding), so everything is stored in e-mail-capable, 7-bit ASCII text characters. But Internet Explorer can decode the file on the fly and display the graphics. This feature greatly expands the power of the Internet. If a document is displayed as one web page, you can download it and all of its associated graphic files, and save everything in one very convenient document. If you do this, you don’t have to save the document as an offline page to keep it readily available. All you do to save a web page in this format is tap the Alt key to enable the Internet Explorer menu, and then click File -> Save As, and choose Web Archive, Single File in the Save As Type field. This secret isn’t hidden, but it sure is powerful. It turns the Web into something that you can actually use as a publishing arena.You can see the entire underlying text file if you open a file with an

mht extension in WordPad. If you click View -> Source in Internet Explorer when viewing an

mht file, you’ll only see the HTML code and not the encoded graphics that are in fact there in the file. Internet Explorer also enables you to save a document as a complete web page (click File -> Save As, and choose Web Page -> Complete in the Save As Type field). In this case, the graphic files are not included in the HTML source text. Instead, Internet Explorer creates a subfolder in which it saves the downloaded graphics files. It rewrites the saved web page to reference the graphics files in this subfolder, and enters the Web page’s URL as a comment at the top of the page. We wish Save As -> Web Archive for Email saved the web page’s URL as a comment. Finally, you can also save web pages as a Webpage type, which includes only the text of the page along with links to the online graphics. If you choose this option and view a saved page while offline, you’ll see just the text. However, if you are online, the graphics will load as normal.

Turning Your Favorites into a Web Page The Favorites menu and submenus are fine for starters, but sometimes it is a bit of a drag to search repeatedly through all these menus. How about creating a single web page of all your favorites? Or separate web pages for different subsets of favorites? Internet Explorer includes the Import/Export Wizard, which can export your favorites or cookies. It writes them to your disk in a format that Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, and other browsers can read. You can also use the wizard to import cookies and favorites from other browsers. The wizard writes out your favorites as an HTML file. This makes it easy to look through your favorites with Notepad and edit them if you like. You can also use the HTML file as a page in Internet Explorer, from which you can easily jump to any site on your list. Choose File -> Import and Export to run the wizard.