In preparation for your extensive travels on the World Wide Web via Internet Explorer, you may need to make some minor adjustments. This article is the place to look for information on everything from how to change the way Web pages are displayed on your screen to ways to tweak your browser’s performance. This article also provides information about adding Active Desktop Items so that the latest and greatest Web information automatically finds its way from cyberspace to your computer desktop, with no World Wide Wait.

Changing Your Home Page

Each time you start the Internet Explorer browser, it opens a specially designated page, which it calls the home page. The home page is also where Internet Explorer goes when you click the Home button on the toolbar. If your computer isn’t connected to the Internet when you click Home, Internet Explorer loads the home page locally from the cache. The cache is an area of a computer’s hard drive used to store data recently downloaded from the Internet so that the data can be redisplayed quickly. If the page doesn’t happen to be in the cache at the time (because you deleted its files before quitting the browser the last time), Internet Explorer gives you an error message and displays an empty Web page called about:blank. To return to your home page, you must go online again and click the Home button. To change the home page on your computer, follow these steps:

1. Launch the Internet Explorer browser and go to the Web page that you want to make the new home page.

2. Choose Tools -> Internet Options. The Internet Options dialog box appears. Click the General tab if it isn’t already selected.

3. In the Home Page section of the dialog box, click the Use Current button to make the current page your new home page. You can also type the URL of the page that you want to designate as your home page in the Address text box.

4. Click OK to close the Internet Options dialog box. After you designate the page of your choice as your home page, you can return that page at anytime by clicking the Home button. If, for the sake of speed, you want a blank Web page to be used as the home page, click the Use Blank button. Internet Explorer then enters about:blank (the name of its standard blank page) in the Address text box. You also can click the Stop button on the navigation bar as soon as Internet Explorer starts loading the page.

Changing the Way Web Pages Look

A Web page, depending on the computer displaying it, can appear in a variety of fonts and colors and can use various characters and symbols for different languages of the world. The combination of the Web browser settings and the design of the individual pages controls how Web pages look in Internet Explorer. The changes that you make to the Internet Explorer settings only affect the way Web pages look on your screen. You don’t have to worry that you’re actually changing somebody’s Web page.

Changing the text size

You can customize your copy of Internet Explorer so that you get larger, easier-to-read text, or you can choose a smaller font size that lets you see more text at a time on the screen. To change the display size of text in Web pages, follow these steps:

1. Choose View -> Text Size. A submenu appears with the following size options: Largest, Larger, Medium, Smaller, and Smallest. The Largest, Larger, Smaller, and Smallest font sizes are all relative to the Medium font size (which is the default size used by Internet Explorer).

2. Choose the Largest or Larger option to make the text on the current Web page appear bigger. Choose the Smaller or Smallest option to make the text appear smaller.

Selecting a different font

Many Web pages do not specify a font for the proportional and fixed-width (or monospaced) text on the Web page, leaving that determination to Internet Explorer. When you first start browsing the Web with Internet Explorer, it uses Times New Roman to render nonspecifically defined proportional text and Courier New for all fixed-width text. If you prefer other fonts for rendering the proportional and fixed-width text, you can modify one of the Internet Explorer character sets (different styles of the alphabet and other symbols). To choose other fonts, follow these steps:

1. Choose Tools -> Internet Options. The Internet Options dialog box appears. Click the General tab if it isn’t already selected.

2. Click the Fonts button.

3. To change the font used to render proportional text, choose a font in the Web Page Font list box. Your particular choices depend upon which fonts you have installed on the computer.

4. To change the font used to render fixed-width text, choose a font in the Plain Text Font list box.

5. Click OK twice to close the Fonts dialog box and the Internet Options dialog box.

Changing the text and background colors

If you have problems reading the text on a Web page due to its text color and background, you may be able to modify these colors (assuming that the Web page author hasn’t specified his or her own colors). By default, Internet Explorer chooses black for the text color and battleship gray for the background (page) color. To set custom colors for your Web page background and text, follow these steps:

1. Choose Tools -> Internet Options. The Internet Options dialog box appears. Click the General tab if it isn’t already selected.

2. Click the Colors button. The Colors dialog box appears. In this dialog box, you can set colors for the text and background as well as the colors for visited and unvisited hyperlinks.

3. In the Colors section of the Colors dialog box, deselect the Use Windows Colors check box. Deselecting this check box enables you to specify your own colors.

4. To change the text color, click the Text button in the Colors dialog box to open the Color dialog box, and then select a new color from the Basic Colors palette. Then click OK.

5. To change the background color of the page, click the Background button in the Colors dialog box to open the Color dialog box, and then select a new color from the Basic Colors palette. Then click OK.

6. When you finish setting the text and background colors that you want to use, click OK twice to close the Colors dialog box and the Internet Options dialog box. When the Internet Options dialog box closes, Internet Explorer displays the current Web page in the text and background colors that you selected. If it doesn’t, this means that the author of this Web page has explicitly set a style for the page, which takes precedence over the browser default settings that you set.

Changing the way your browser displays hyperlinks

Hypertext links (hyperlinks) are a special form of text that, when clicked, take you to a new location on the current page or to another page altogether. Traditionally, blue underlined text on-screen indicates the hypertext links that you haven’t yet followed. When you follow a hypertext link and later return to the original page, Internet Explorer lets you know that you’ve followed the link by displaying the same hyperlink in purple underlined text. People often refer to these links as unvisited and visited links. To modify the color of hypertext links in Internet Explorer, follow these steps:

1. Choose Tools -> Internet Options. The Internet Options dialog box appears. Click the General tab if it isn’t already selected.

2. Click the Colors button. The Colors dialog box appears.

3. To change the color for visited hyperlinks, click the Visited button and choose a new color from the palette in the Color dialog box. Click OK to close the Color dialog box.

4. To change the color for unvisited hyperlinks, click the Unvisited button and choose a new color from the palette in the Color dialog box. Click OK to close the Color dialog box. In addition to customizing the visited and unvisited hypertext colors, you can choose to assign a hover color (that is, the color that hyperlinked text becomes when you position your mouse pointer over it).

5. To have text hyperlinks turn a special color whenever your mouse pointer hovers above them, select the Use Hover Color check box. If you don’t like the default color of red, click the Hover button and choose a new color from the palette in the Color dialog box. Click OK to close the Color dialog box.

6. When you’re finished changing the link colors, click OK twice to close the Colors dialog box and the Internet Options dialog box.

Customizing Toolbars

Internet Explorer contains several toolbars, which you can customize to your liking. You can change the display size of toolbars, hide toolbars, and add buttons to toolbars.

Changing the size of toolbars

You can minimize the amount of space that the toolbar takes up by putting Internet Explorer in full-screen view. To do so, choose View -> Full Screen or press F11. The full-screen view shrinks the amount of space given to the toolbars Internet Explorer hides all the toolbars except the Standard Buttons toolbar, which now uses smaller icons. When Internet Explorer is in full-screen mode, the browser adds an Auto- Hide command to the shortcut menu that appears when you right-click the remaining Standard Buttons toolbar. Selecting the Auto-Hide command causes the entire toolbar to slide up until it’s off the screen. To redisplay the toolbar, move the mouse pointer up to the top of the Internet Explorer window. When the mouse pointer rolls over the area where the toolbar would normally be, the toolbar magically (and temporarily) reappears. To again fix the Standard Buttons toolbar on the screen, choose the Auto- Hide command from the toolbar’s shortcut menu. You can also take Internet Explorer out of full-screen mode by pressing F11.

Hiding and unhiding a toolbar

You can hide the Standard Buttons toolbar, the Address bar, or the Links bar. To do so, choose View -> Toolbars. From the submenu that appears, click to remove the check mark next to the toolbar that you want to hide. You can also right-click any empty area of the toolbar and choose the appropriate name (Standard Buttons, Address bar, or Links) from the toolbar shortcut menu. To display the hidden toolbar again, reverse this procedure.

Adding a button to the toolbar

You can add a button to the Standard Buttons toolbar to make the button’s command more accessible. Follow these steps:

1. Choose View -> Toolbars -> Customize or right-click the Standard Buttons toolbar and choose Customize from the shortcut menu. The Customize Toolbar dialog box appears.

2. In the Available Toolbar Buttons list box, click the button you want to add to the toolbar, and then click Add. Internet Explorer adds the button to the end of the list in the Current Toolbar Buttons list box.

3. (Optional) To change the position of the newly added button on the toolbar, click the button in the Current Toolbar Buttons list box; then click the Move Up button one or more times.

4. Click the Close button to close the Customize Toolbar dialog box.