Apple users have long been able to take advantage of the Mac OS X Dashboard, and Windows users have been able to download Yahoo Widgets (formerly Konfabulator Widgets). Those things are still available, but now Vista has its own little tools, known as gadgets. Vista gadgets live in the new Windows Sidebar which you can move to the left or right side of the screen by right-clicking it and selecting Properties. Or you can put Gadgets on your Desktop by dragging the little context menu that appears when you hover your mouse over a Gadget.

Instant Search and the Search Panel - Windows Vista

An interactive Instant Search bar is now a feature of every Explorer window in Vista as well as Vista’s Start menu. This may not slow the progress of third-party desktop search applications that are increasingly being promoted as Windows downloads from the major search engines. But Microsoft is, in fact, trying to build into Vista advanced search functions to render such downloads unnecessary. The Instant Search bar can be a handy way to search within a particular application window. Vista’s search function becomes context-specific in many such applications.

Internet Explorer 7.0 Catches Up in Windows Vista

IE 7 won’t win any awards for innovation, having not quite caught up with features its free competitor, the Mozilla Firefox browser, came out with two years ago. But the improved security of IE 7, plus the addition of long-requested features such as tabbed browser windows, make Microsoft’s new browser a solid component of the OS rather than the backward stepchild that IE 6 became. (Users of Windows XP can and should download and install IE 7, if an upgrade to Vista isn’t immediately possible.) Besides the tabbed windows, IE 7 has (thankfully) copied several other features from Firefox, Opera, and other non-Microsoft browsers. These include the ability to add Internet search engines of your choice to IE’s search bar and a default Shink to Fit setting so Web pages will fit your printer’s paper size. However, IE 7 has also gained a few new features that other browsers may themselves need to catch up with. _ Pressing Ctrl+Q or clicking the Quick Tabs tab on the IE 7 toolbar tiles all of your open tabs into a convenient thumbnail view. When you have a lot of tabs open, Quick Tabs can save you a substantial amount of time that you might otherwise spend clicking at random to get back to a particular site. _ Page Zoom is another handy feature. When you’re viewing a web page that’s just too small or too large, hold down the Ctrl key and press + to make the page 10 percent larger, – to make it 10 percent smaller, or 0 (zero) to return the page to its original size. These special keystroke sequences work exactly the same way as they do in Firefox, except that IE 7 scales both images and text. (Firefox 1.5 scaled just text.) The keystrokes work whether you use the symbol keys on the main keyboard or the numeric keypad. _ There’s also a small Page Zoom button on the extreme right of IE 7’s status bar. You can click it once to scale a Web page to 125 percent, click it again for 150 percent, and click it a third time to go back to 100 percent. Fit the Full URL on Printouts - Windows Vista

Sometimes, you want to print out some Web page you’ve found, so you can recommend the site to a friend later. But if the Web address (URL) is a long one, it’s likely to be truncated in the footer of the printed page. That’s because IE, by default, uses a large font and cuts off any of the URL that doesn’t fit on the same line as today’s date. You can make URLs print in full almost every time by clicking Tools➪Internet Options. On the General tab, click the Fonts button and then select a Web page font that’s more compact than Times New Roman, such as Vista’s Cordia New. (This font, which is similar to Arial, also becomes the default font for Web pages that don’t specify a font.) If that doesn’t print the entire Web address, give URLs a separate line. To do so, pull down the Printer toolbar and select Page Setup. Enter &b&u in the Header field to devote the full header to the URL (aligned to the right). Then enter &d&b&p in the Footer field to print the date on the left and the page number on the right at the bottom of each page. (This procedure eliminates printing each page’s title, represented by &w. A Web page’s title takes up space that’s best devoted to printing the full URL, in our view.) Windows Vista  - IE Protected Mode and Phishing Filter   Internet Explorer 7.0, when running under Windows Vista (not XP or earlier operating systems), operates by default in Protected Mode. This means that dishonest web sites that a user happens to visit cannot trick IE 7 into changing Windows system files or other crucial configuration details. A separate feature, but one that can work in concert with Protected Mode to keep users out of trouble, is Microsoft’s new Phishing Filter. IE 7 regularly downloads from a Microsoft server a list of web addresses that appear to be fraudulent. These sites may get on the list because they’re collecting passwords or credit card numbers from gullible consumers, they’re downloading spyware to people’s computers, or for other reasons. In any case, IE 7 doesn’t display known phishing sites, instead warning the user about the identified problems with the site. The features just described are only two of the several Microsoft has added to Internet Explorer. Others include protection against cross-site scripting attacks (in which one site takes over a window used by another site), ActiveX suspension (which disables the most dangerous ActiveX controls), and Windows Defender, which guards against spyware. It’s too early to say whether the new IE security features will add up to an adequate level of safety for Windows users, or whether third-party security products must still be added to Windows. It’s likely that Microsoft’s own programs will play second fiddle to third-party developers, who concentrate specifically on antiphishing and antispyware research. Read the comparative reviews of security add-ons in respected computer magazines to learn which products provide the best security—and then invest a few bucks in any independent downloads that are top rated.