How to use Internet Explorer and Firefox
You’ve probably been using it for years, but let me formally introduce you to your web browser. According to the latest stats you’re probably using Internet Explorer (IE). Some people don’t even know what a web browser is. They know that when they click the “e” icon the internet shows up. If you’re one of THEM, the “e” icon activates the web browser called Internet Explorer. I’m going to cover some web browser basics and some helpful tips you might not be aware of.
Different Web Browsers
First, IE isn’t the only browser out there. Yup, that’s right. If you don’t really like the way your web browser works, you actually have the right to download a number of other web browsers to try. And the best part is they’re free. The most popular alternatives to IE are Firefox, Opera and Google’s Chrome. MAC users are more familiar with their web browser, Safari (which you can also get for Windows). Now I’m not going to take the time to explain the differences between them here. You can find a whole bunch of comparison articles online. I’m only going to talk about IE and Firefox. The other browsers have similar functions to what I’m going to talk about.
Browser Version Numbers
At the time of this posting, Internet Explorer is on version 8. If you’re running Windows XP or Vista, your computer has probably updated you to this version without you even realizing it. If you’re using an older operating system like Windows Millennium or 2000, then you might still be using IE 6. Firefox is currently on version 3.5. Again you might only be using version 2 of FF. A lot of numbers, I know. Why all these numbers? Software is upgraded as technologies improve. With each new version of a web browser, we usually get new cool features that may or may not make our internet experience faster or easier. That being said let’s talk about the most common features.
Navigation Buttons
Older browsers had lots of buttons that no one really used (like Search, Media, Mail, etc.). Newer browsers have only a few buttons which helps to have more space to view the websites we visit.
The Back and Forward buttons (usually look like arrows) allow you to go back to the last page you visited and then forward again to the page you jumped from. The more “surfing” you do online, the more you can use the Back and Forward buttons to revisit a page you were at earlier. There’s even a tiny little arrow pointing south that lets you jump further ahead and back by way of it’s drop-down menu.
Of course if you spend a lot of time online, back and forth might not work for you. That’s where the History menu comes in. This provides a list of your most recently visited pages and you can easily click on any of them to jump right back to. In Firefox the History menu is clearly located to the left of the Bookmarks menu. When you scroll down you see that you have the ability to open “Recently Closed Tabs”. In Internet Explorer you’ll find the History tab when you click the Favorites button. A drop down will appear, showing three tabs: Favorites, Feeds, and History. Just navigate to the day you think you went to the page in question.
Since I’ve already mentioned them, we’ll discuss Favorites (Bookmarks in Firefox). If you KNOW that you plan to revisit a certain website or web page, then using this function will help you organize and “bookmark” your “favorite” websites. When you’ve found a website or page that you want to add to your Favorites, click the Favorites button and click “Add to Favorites”. Okay, there’s one more thing to mention here. If you’re one of those people who uses “Add to Favorites” a lot, you might have this long list of web pages. It’s amazing how many “favorites” we can find. If they’re truly our favorites, we shouldn’t have so many. That’s why I like calling them “bookmarks” (even though they’re not for books).
If you have a long list of favorites that extends past the height of your screen, you’ll have to use the very tiny arrows that appear at the top and bottom of the list to view the rest of your list. In Firefox you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse (assuming you have one) while hovering over your list to go up and down.
The best way to avoid an ever growing list of “a billion favorite pages where I can find really nice shoes that I want some day” (that’s for all you ladies out there – especially my wife), is to organize your favorites into folders. Under the “Add to Favorites” you’ll see the “Organize Favorites” function. Click that and a dialog box comes up where you can create, rename or delete folders in your Favorites. You can create a folder called “Shopping” and even create a “shoes” folder inside the “Shopping” folder. Now the next time you find a sweet pair of pink, studded stilettos you can’t live without, click “Add to Favorites”, navigate (“Create In” for IE) to the “shoes” folder you created and click “OK” (“Done” in Firefox). Now you should see your new folders in your Favorites list.
Other Buttons
The Home button (usually represented by a house) takes you back to your designated start page (the first page that comes up when your browser opens). This will be different for everyone. Firefox gives me the Google home page with a Firefox logo. I usually keep it set to that since I use Google all the time. You might have the MSN home page on IE or your internet provider’s software might have set you up with their home page (like Verizon).
Did you know you can change your home page? Yes, again you have that right. If you want the Google page, just go to Google’s main page (www.google.com), click on “Tools” in your top menu, click “Internet Options”, and under “Home page”, in the “General” tab, click “Use Current”. That’s it. Your anti-virus software might ask you if it’s okay to change your home page. Just tell it “ok”.
The Stop button only serves one purpose for me (okay maybe two). It’s only useful if you click on the wrong link and need to stop it from downloading (of course, you could also hit the Back button). The other purpose is when a web page just doesn’t want to finish loading. I’m sure you’ve all experienced this at some point. Sometimes, if enough data has been downloaded, you can still see a good portion of the glitchy page when you hit Stop.
The Refresh button (as I’ve probably told most of my web clients at some point) is necessary for seeing new changes to a website. Web browsers keep web pages and images from our recently visited websites in what’s called “cache”. This is to speed up the process the next time we visit the same website. The cache holds all the graphics in a “temporary internet folder” on your machine. By clicking the Refresh button you’re telling the browser NOT to use the cached images, but to re-download everything on that page from the internet.
Tabs and New Windows
Older web browsers only had the ability to open additional web browser windows. Some websites would do this automatically – which isn’t always necessary. I’m not referring to “pop-ups”. I’m referring to full-screen windows. Of course this was useful if you wanted to look at two websites at the same time, but confusing to people who didn’t even realize a second window had opened. You can still do this with today’s browsers, but now we have “tabs” available to us (as of Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2).
Tabs allow us to have multiple websites open in one browser window. You can jump from one to the other by clicking on the tab of your choice. To create a new tab, you can either go under the File Menu and click “New Tab” or, if you’re using IE 8 or FF 3.5, you can click the little blank box to the right of your tabs. You can shuffle your tabs around if you click and drag them. You can also view thumbnails of your tabbed pages by clicking on the button to the left of your tabs with the four little squares (for Firefox you’ll have to load in the extension called Firefox Showcase). You can close any tab by clicking on its “x” button. And, if you happen to have so many tabs open at once and they don’t all fit on the screen, there are these little black arrows pointing down that you can click to get a list of your tabs so you can jump to the one you want.
Useful Firefox Extensions
The #1 reason why I switched to Firefox as my “default” browser was because of its extensive list of free extensions (add-ons) which add more functionality to your browsing experience. IE now has add-ons as well but I don’t believe they have as many at this time.
The first useful add-on, which I use everyday, is the Web Search Bar. This automatically comes with Firefox (and IE 7) but you can add to it or subtract from it. What do I mean? This tool allows you to perform an online search without first having to go to your favorite search engine. The default list of search engines include Google, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, etc. By clicking on the small arrow next to the Google “G”, a drop down list appears, allowing me to pick another search engine to use.
By clicking on “Manage Search Engines” from that same drop down list, I can add other search engines I use like Wikipedia, IMDB, Flickr, Webster Dictionary, and more. It quickly becomes a handy little reference/research tool. And I can delete engines that I don’t use just as easily.
CoolIris is a cool picture and video browser experience that keeps getting better with every version. When browsing images on Google or Flickr or videos on YouTube and other sites, this add-on turns your browser into a cool 3D wall to quickly scroll through all the images or videos in your search instead of going page by page.
The Weather Channel’s add-on gives you up to date weather reports locally, nationally, or globally. Quick links and rollovers provide everything from tomorrows’ forecast, the latest radar images, or recent video broadcast.
As a web designer I enjoy all the web developing extensions created for Firefox that make my job easier. There is an enormous list of useful add-ons for everyone that can help you organize your bookmarks, monitor your Ebay auctions, or improve your downloading experience.
The #2 reason is because it has a built-in spell checker. That rocks!!!
Useful Browser Tips
Hate scroll bars? Hate scrolling? Did you know…
- You can scroll web pages with the wheel on your mouse (if you have a wheel)
- You can scroll with the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard
- You can jump up and down a page with the page up and page down keys
- You can jump to the top of a page by using the home key
- You can jump to the bottom of a page by using the end key
Right-clicking. How many of you ever use the right-side of your mouse (left-side for lefties)? When you right-click anywhere on your computer, a list of options pops up. In your web browser those options include functions like back, forward, stop, and refresh. Depending on what you right-click on more options can appear like: view background image, save image, copy link, view html source, plus functions for some of your add-ons, and more. So play around with it and see if life gets a little easier.
Tabbing (not the Tabs I mentioned earlier). If the website was setup properly… the next time you’re filling out a form online to buy something (especially concert tickets), use the Tab key on your keyboard to jump to the next text box instead of using the mouse every time. Online forms are supposed to be setup so that tabbing will take you to the next box or at least the next “required” box. This will cut down on your time spent filling out your personal information.
Conclusion
So no matter which web browser you use – Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari… play around with it a little and discover new ways to do things. Try using tabs instead of new windows, try some add-ons if your browser is compatible, use right-click and your keyboard keys, and feel free to email me with any questions.
Tags: firefox, internet, internet explorer, linkedin
