Make the most of Internet Explorer 7

jjones | Guides | 12/03/2008 16:11pm
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What’s the best thing about Internet Explorer 7? Is it tabbed browsing? The icon thumbnails of every site you’re currently visiting? Or perhaps it’s the way in which the Favorites Center enables you to sort your Favorites by name, group them into folders or view your browsing history in order of popularity. We suspect everyone has a different answer.

Some of the most important features in IE7 aren’t so obvious, but they’re a big deal nonetheless. Protected Mode (see overleaf) stops nasties from sneaking onto your system, and the browser warns you if a web address contains a mix of character sets. That’s because sneaky sites use non-English characters that look like normal letters, so for example there’s a character in the Russian alphabet that looks like, but isn’t, a lower case ‘a’. That means sites can attempt to fool you with domain names that look like reputable ones, in much the same way that MICROS0FT looks like MICROSOFT (in the first one
we’ve replaced a letter O with a zero). IE7 is smart to such shenanigans.

PICK THE POPS Not all pop-ups are unwanted. When IE7 blocks one, click on the information bar to allow pop-ups for the site you’re visiting.

Hurrah, too, for the Phishing Filter. Phishing is a horrible – and horribly lucrative – scam where criminals send official-looking emails that take you to copies of big-name sites, particularly banks or auction sites. If you attempt to log in, the criminals grab your personal details, head off to the real site and clean out your account before you can say “aaargh!”

The Phishing Filter can help stop such scammers in their tracks. It checks sites against a database of known scams, and if it thinks something’s dodgy it tells you so in no uncertain terms. If you spot a scam that the filter doesn’t know about you can report it by clicking Tools > Phishing Filter > Report this Website – which means every other IE7 user will be protected from it in future. Like any technology you should never rely on it 100 per cent, but in our experience it’s been utterly reliable.

Customise your copy

You can bring back the File, Edit… menu by pressing Alt on the keyboard, and if you pop into Tools > Toolbars you can customise the toolbar icons to suit your way of browsing. Also in the Tools menu you’ll find Internet Options. If you click
on this and then type several addresses in the Home Page box – with each one on a new line – then when you launch Internet Explorer it will automatically open each page in its own tab. It’s a massive time saver.

Internet Options has more goodies up its sleeve. Under Browsing History you can delete personal data – handy if you’ve been searching for a birthday present for a family member and you don’t want them finding out before it turns up – and you can change the default search engine by clicking on Search >Settings. Below that button there’s a second Settings button, and that enables you to
change the way tabs behave. For example, you can get IE7 to open links from other programs, such as your email program, in a new window instead of in a new tab.

HAPPY HOME It’s now possible to have multiple sites as your home page. To add one, click on the arrow next to the Home icon and select Add or Change Home Page.

Safer surfing

In Internet Options > Privacy you can make IE7’s privacy protection more or less strict, and you can override the settings for specific sites – so you can block tracking ‘cookies’ from everything but your favourite online shop. You can be really picky about the cookies Internet Explorer accepts: click Advanced and you can allow first-party cookies – from the site you’re actually visiting – but block third-party ones from advertising networks or ne’er-do-wells.

It’s a similar story with the pop-up blocker, because sometimes you do want pop-ups. It happened to me last night: some sites used pop-ups for image galleries. As I wanted to see them, I used the Information Bar that appeared to temporarily allow pop-ups on those sites.

For parents, the Content tab is great. Here you can set up Parental Controls to limit the time your darlings spend online, and also enable Content Advisor to block unsuitable sites. The Advisor is in four sections, of which two are particularly important: Ratings, where you can block content that’s been classified by various family-friendly bodies; and Approved Sites, where you
can add your own list of safe sites. You can also use the Content tab to enable or disable Autocomplete, which can remember things you type in so you don’t have to keep typing the same data again and again. It’s worth disabling this on a shared PC, though – particularly if it’s going to be used by strangers.

Under Internet Options > Advanced you’ll find Manage Add-ons, which makes it easy to disable any browser add-ons you’ve installed and decided you can’t be bothered with. Simply scroll to the add-on you want to shut down and click on Disable.

Little gems

Some of our favourite features are the little ones, like reordering open tabs by clicking and dragging them. If you hold down

Shiftand scroll the mouse wheel you can move backwards or forwards between visited pages, and if you press Ctrl and + or - you can zoom in and out. Hold down Ctrlwhen you click on a link and it opens in a background tab; click with Ctrland Shiftand the new tab opens in the foreground. Another favourite is Ctrland Tab, which cycles through browser tabs the same way Ctrl and Altcycles through open programs.

So what’s your favourite IE7 feature, trick or add-on? Let us know at forums.windowsvistamagazine.com.

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