Internet Explorer owes its existence to a single type of document the Web page (also known as an HTML document). At first glance, a Web page looks like any other nicely formatted document containing graphics and text. What differentiates a Web page from a regular document? In a Web page, text and graphics elements can be used as hyperlinks. When you click a hyperlink, you’re transported to another Web page.

Launching Internet Explorer

The Windows desktop includes several doorways to the Internet Explorer browser. Although you could probably hold a contest to find out exactly how many ways Microsoft has provided for starting Internet Explorer, the following three are the most useful:  -  Double-click the Internet Explorer shortcut on your desktop.  -  On the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the screen, choose Start -> All Programs -> Internet Explorer.  -  Click the Launch Internet Explorer Browser button on the Quick Launch toolbar located on the taskbar. (If the Quick Launch toolbar is not displayed, right-click the taskbar and choose Toolbars  -> Quick Launch.)

Accessing a Web site

After you start Internet Explorer, you can tell it which Web site you want to go to. If you haven’t saved the Web site in your Favorites list (see “Keeping Track of Your Favorite Web Sites,” later in this article), you must type the Web site’s URL or choose it from a list of Web sites you’ve recently viewed. To access a Web site, follow these steps:

1. Choose File -> Open. The Open dialog box displays.

2. In the Open text box, type the URL of the site you want to visit or click the drop-down arrow and select a site from the list.

3. Click OK. You also can access a Web site by positioning the cursor in the Address box of the Internet Explorer window, typing the URL of the Web site you’d like to go to, and pressing Enter or clicking the Go button.

Elements of the Internet Explorer window

Each of the launch methods covered in the preceding section opens Internet Explorer

The Explorer bar

The Explorer bar is a frame that appears on the left side of the Internet Explorer screen when you want to perform a search, work with your Favorites list, or display a history of recently viewed Web pages. Click the Search, Favorites, or History button on the Standard Buttons toolbar to display the Explorer bar and additional options for each of these functions. The contents of the current Web page appear in the area (frame) on the right. The Explorer bar in Internet Explorer comes in four different flavors:

-  Search bar: The Search bar gives you access to the various search engines that you can use to search the World Wide Web for particular topics. To open the Search bar, click the Search button, choose View -> Explorer Bar -> Search, or press Ctrl+E. (See “Searching the Web,” later in this article.)

-  Favorites bar: The Favorites bar contains links to all the Web pages that you have marked as your favorites. To open the Favorites bar, click the Favorites button, choose View -> Explorer Bar -> Favorites, or press Ctrl+I.

-  Media bar: The Media bar gives you easy access to buttons that let you play music of your choice, whether it be your favorite radio station or CD. You can also use the rest of the bar to read up on the latest audio and video news.

-  History bar: The History bar gives you access to links of all the Web pages that you’ve visited in the last 20 days. To open the History bar, click the History button, choose View -> Explorer Bar -> History, or press Ctrl+H. (See “Viewing Pages from the History Folder,” later in this article.) To remove the Explorer bar from the browsing area when you no longer need access to its links, click the Close button (the X) in the upper-right corner of the Explorer bar.

The toolbars

Internet Explorer includes several varieties of toolbars to help you accomplish tasks quickly. The following list describes these toolbars.

-  Menu bar: As with all standard Windows menu bars, the Internet Explorer menu bar consists of a group of pull-down menus (File, Edit, View, Favorites, Tools, and Help) that you can click to reveal a list of options and submenus.

-  Standard Buttons toolbar: This toolbar contains the tools that you use most often for navigating and performing tasks, such as the following: • Back: Enables you to return to any Web sites you may have previously visited during your Web session. • Forward: Takes you to any available pages in the History listing. • Stop: Lets you stop a page from loading. • Refresh: Reloads or updates the current Web page. • Home: Displays the Web page you designate as the home page. • Search: Displays or hides the Search Explorer bar. • Favorites: Displays or hides the Favorites Explorer bar. • Media: Displays or hides the Media Explorer bar. • History: Displays or hides the History Explorer bar.

-  Address bar: This bar shows you the URL of the Web page currently displayed in the Internet Explorer browsing area. As you visit different pages during a Web browsing session, Internet Explorer adds the URL of each site that you visit to the drop-down list attached to the Address bar. To revisit one of the Web pages that you’ve seen during the session, you can click the drop-down button at the end of the Address box and click its URL or its page icon in the drop-down list.

-  Links bar: This button contains a drop-down list of shortcuts to various Microsoft Web pages RealPlayer, Customize Links, and various other pages. (If the Links bar is hidden by the Address bar, double-click the word Links to reveal the full Links bar.) You can, however, change the shortcuts listed on the Links bar to reflect the Web pages that you visit most often. To add a Quick Link button for the Web page that you’re currently viewing, drag its Web page icon (the icon that precedes the URL in the Address bar) to the place on the Links bar where you want the Quick Link button to appear. To remove a button from the Links bar, right-click the button and choose Delete from the shortcut menu.

-  Discussions bar: This toolbar appears below the main browsing area when you click the Discuss button on the Standard Buttons toolbar. The Discussions bar contains buttons for taking part in online discussions. You can add your own comments and reply to other people’s comments pertaining to the current Web page.

-  Quick Launch toolbar: The Quick Launch toolbar provides one-click access to the Internet Explorer browser and other applications or features. This toolbar, which appears next to the Start button on the Windows taskbar, includes a variety of buttons, depending on the programs you have on your computer. You can quickly display or hide toolbars by right-clicking the menu bar and selecting the toolbar that you want to display or hide from the shortcut menu. In this shortcut menu, a check mark appears next to toolbars that are currently displayed.

Searching the Web

The World Wide Web holds an enormous wealth of information on almost every subject known to humanity, but you need to know how to get to that information. To help Web surfers like you locate sites containing the information that you’re interested in, a number of so-called search engines have been designed. Each search engine maintains a slightly different directory of the sites on the World Wide Web (which are mostly maintained and updated by automated programs called Web crawlers, spiders, and robots).

Starting the search

Internet Explorer gives you access to all the most popular search engines through the Search bar, a special Explorer bar for searching the Web. You can open the Search bar in one of three ways:  -  Click the Search button on the Standard Buttons toolbar.  -  Choose View -> Explorer Bar -> Search.  -  Press Ctrl+E. In this window, you find a text box where you can type a few words to describe the kind of Web page to look for. After you enter the keyword or words (known affectionately as a search string in programmers’ parlance) to search for in this text box, you begin the search by clicking the Search button. Internet Explorer then conducts a search for Web sites containing the keywords by using the first search engine (the one listed in the Search bar). If that search engine finds no matches, Internet Explorer then conducts the same search by using the next search engine in its list. After exhausting the links in the top-ten list, you can display links to the next ten matching pages returned by the search engine by clicking some sort of next button. Note that in some search engines, this button appears as a page number in a list of the next available result pages at the bottom of the Search bar. After you’re convinced that you’ve seen all the best matches to your search, you can conduct another search with the same search engine by using slightly different terms. You can also switch to another search engine to see what kinds of results it produces by using the same search string.

Limiting your searches

To avoid getting back thousands of irrelevant (or at the very minimum, uninteresting) search results, you need to consider telling the search engines to return links only to sites that contain all the terms you enter in the search string. For example, say that you want to find sites that deal with koi (the ornamental carp that are very popular in Japan) ponds. If you type the search string koi ponds in the Find a Web Page Containing text box, the search engines will return links to Web sites with both koi and ponds (without any reference to the fish) in their descriptions, as well as sites that contain both koi and ponds in their descriptions. The problem with this approach is that it can give you far too many extraneous results because many search engines search for each term in the search string independently as well as together. It’s as though you had asked for Web sites with descriptions containing koi and/or ponds. The easiest way to tell the search engines that you want links to a Web site returned only when all the terms in your search string are matched in their descriptions is to enclose all the terms in double quotation marks. In the case of the koi ponds search string, you can find more Web sites that deal only with koi ponds (as opposed to frog ponds or other ponds containing just garden plants), by typing “koi ponds” in the Find a Web Page Containing text box. Taking this little extra step often brings you fewer, but more useful, results.

Browsing in full screen mode

One of the biggest drawbacks of Web surfing is the amount of scrolling that you have to do to see all the information on a particular Web page. To help minimize the amount of scrolling, Internet Explorer offers a full screen mode that automatically minimizes the space normally occupied by the menu bar, Standard Buttons toolbar, Address bar, and Links bar. In full screen mode, only a version of the Standard Buttons toolbar with small buttons is displayed at the top of the screen. To switch to full screen mode, press F11 or choose View -> Full Screen. To get out of full screen mode and return to the normal view, press F11 again.

Displaying Previously Viewed Web Pages

As you browse different Web sites, Internet Explorer keeps track of your progression through their pages. You can then use the Back and Forward buttons on the toolbar, or the equivalent commands on the View -> Go To submenu, to move back and forth between the pages that you’ve visited in the current work session. If you use the Back and Forward buttons on the Standard Buttons toolbar, you get the added benefit of being able to tell in advance which page will be redisplayed when you click the button. Simply position the mouse pointer on the Back or Forward button and hover it there until the title of the Web page appears in a little ToolTip box. Both the Back and Forward buttons have drop-down lists attached to them. When you display these drop-down lists (by clicking the drop-down arrow to the immediate right of the Back or Forward button), they show a list, in most-recent to least-recent order, of the nine most recent Web pages visited in the work session before (Back) or after (Forward) the current Web page. By using the drop-down list attached to the Back button, you can avoid having to click Back, Back, Back, Back, and so on, to revisit a page that you saw some time ago during the current Web surfing session.

Keeping Track of Your Favorite Web Sites

As you browse the Web with Internet Explorer, you may come across interesting Web sites that you want to revisit later. To make finding a site again easy, you can recall its home page (or any of its other pages) by placing a reference to the page in the Internet Explorer Favorites folder. You can then revisit the page by selecting its title from the Favorites pull-down menu or from the Favorites bar. (See “Viewing pages from the Favorites folder,” later in this article.)

Adding Web pages to your Favorites folder

To add a Web page to the Favorites folder, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Web page that you want to add to your Favorites.

2. Choose Favorites -> Add To Favorites. The Add Favorite dialog box opens. The name of the Web page displayed in the title bar of the Internet Explorer browser window also appears in the Name text box.

3. (Optional) You can edit the Web page title that appears in the Name text box. Keep in mind that this text is listed on the Favorites menu, so you want to make it as descriptive as possible, while, at the same time, keeping it brief.

4. (Optional) To make the Web page that you’re adding to your Favorites available for offline browsing, select the Make Available Offline check box.

5. (Optional) To add the favorite to a subfolder of Favorites, click the Create In button to expand the Add Favorite dialog box (if the files and folders aren’t already displayed in the list box); then click the icon of the appropriate subfolder or click the New Folder button to create a new folder in which to add your new favorite.

6. Click OK to add the Web page to your Favorites. If you clicked the Make Available Offline check box in Step 4, a synchronization box appears and automatically configures your settings. You’re all done!

Viewing pages from the Favorites folder

The Favorites folder contains hyperlinks to all the Web pages that you’ve marked during your cyberspace travels on the World Wide Web, as well as all the channels and local folders and files on which you rely. From the Favorites list, you can open Web pages that you want to revisit, go to a channel home page, or open a favorite file with its native application (such as Word 2003 if it’s a Word document, or Excel 2003 if it’s an Excel workbook). To display the links in your Favorites folder, you can select the links directly from the Favorites pull-down menu, click the Favorites button on the Standard Buttons toolbar, or press Ctrl+I. When you click the Favorites button or press Ctrl+I, Internet Explorer presents the subfolders and links of your Favorites folder in the Favorites bar (a frame on the left side of the screen). The current Web page appears in a frame on the right. To display the links in one of the Favorites subfolders, click the folder icon containing the link in the Favorites bar. Then click the desired hyperlink to display a Web page (if it’s a Web hyperlink), a list of folders and files (if it’s a link to a local disk), or to open a document in its own program (if it’s a link to a particular file).

Organizing your favorites

The Organize Favorites dialog box (which you open by choosing Favorites -> Organize Favorites), lets you arrange the links in your Favorites folder (see “Adding Web pages to your Favorites folder,” earlier in this article), as well as those in your Channels and Links folders.

Organizing your favorites and links into folders

One of the best methods for organizing favorites is to group them together into folders, maybe even using subfolders within those folders. After you have a folder structure, you can then move the links to your favorite pages into the appropriate folders, renaming them if you so choose. Use the following options in the Organize Favorites dialog box to group the links in your Favorites and Links folders:  -  To create a new folder, click the Create Folder button, type a new name for the folder icon, and press Enter.  -  To move a link to a favorite page, click its icon to highlight it, and then click the Move to Folder button to open the Browse for Folder dialog box. Click the destination folder in the Browse for Folder dialog box and click OK.  -  To rename a link to a favorite page, click its icon to select it, and then click the Rename button. Edit the description and press Enter.  -  To delete a link to a favorite page, click its icon, and then click the Delete button. Then click Yes to confirm the deletion. Don’t delete or rename the Links folder in the Organize Favorites dialog box. Internet Explorer needs the Links folder so that it knows what buttons to display on the Links bar. Organizing your favorites, channels, and links with drag-and-drop You can also use the drag-and-drop method to reorganize the links to your Favorites and Links folders from the Favorites Explorer bar in Internet Explorer. Click the Favorites button on the Standard Buttons toolbar and perform one of the following actions:  -  To open a folder to display the folder’s contents, click its folder icon in the Favorites bar. Internet Explorer then shows a series of icons for each of the links that it contains. To close a folder and hide its contents, click the folder icon again.  -  To move an icon to a new position in its folder, drag its icon up or down until you reach the desired position. As you drag, Internet Explorer shows you where the item will be inserted by displaying a heavy horizontal I-beam. The program also shows you where you can’t move the icon by displaying the International No symbol.  -  To move an icon to another (existing) folder, drag its icon to the folder icon. When the folder becomes highlighted, you can drop the icon and it goes into the highlighted folder.

Viewing Pages from the History Folder

The History folder contains a list of links to the Web pages that you visited within the last 20 days (unless you’ve changed this default setting). These hyperlinks are arranged chronologically from least recent to most recent, grouped by days for the current week, and then by weeks for all days further back. To display the links in your History folder, click the History button on the Standard Buttons toolbar or press Ctrl+H. Internet Explorer shows the folders for each Web site that you visited on a particular day or during a particular week in the History bar (a pane on the left side of the screen). The current Web page appears in a pane on the right.