Chapter 7
In This Chapter
Saving and printing web pages
Browsing in several windows or tabs (or both!)
Bookmarking your favorite pages
Making your browser remember website usernames and passwords
Controlling cookies stored on your computer
Covering your tracks, browsing-wise
Stopping pop-ups from taking over your screen
Adding plug-ins to your browser
If you’ve read Chapter 6, you’re all set to browse the web. But to be an efficient, downright clever web surfer, you need to know about other browser features, such as printing web pages, displaying more than one web page at the same time, and storing the addresses of web pages you like to visit often. You also need to know how to handle spyware, an Internet menace we describe in Chapter 2. This chapter is your guide to these extra features and how you can make the most of them right away.
Frequently, you see something on a web page that’s worth saving for later. Sometimes it’s interesting information, a picture, or another type of file. There’s not much point to saving an entire page: It’s usually made up of several files — one for the text, one for each picture, and sometimes other files — so your browser can’t just save the page in a file. However, you can save images and text from a page.
You can copy and paste text from a web page into a word processing document or another type of file. Select the text with your mouse (click and drag the mouse over the text) and press Ctrl+C (Command+C on the Mac) to save the text on your computer’s Clipboard. Then switch to the word processing or other type of program, position the cursor where you want the text to appear, and press Ctrl+V (Command+V on the Mac) to paste it. You’ll probably need to do some reformatting once the text is in your document.
To save an image you see on a web page, follow these steps:
To print a page, press Ctrl+P (Windows) or Command+P (Mac). Depending on your browser, you can also click something:
The browser has to reformat the page to print, which can take a minute, so remember that patience is a virtue. Fortunately, each browser displays a progress window to let you know how it’s doing. You’ll see your computer’s usual Print dialog box, where you can choose your printer.
You’ll find some web pages that you want to visit repeatedly. (Both of us have visited the Google website thousands of times by now.) The makers of fine browsers have, fortunately, provided a handy way for you to remember those URLs so that you don’t have to write them on the wall and type them again later.
The idea is simple: Your browser lets you add a web address to a list on your computer. Later, when you want to go back, you just go to your list and pick the page you want. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari call these saved web addresses bookmarks; Internet Explorer calls them favorites.
To go to one of the pages on your bookmark list, just choose its entry from the menu.
If you’re like most users, your bookmark menu grows and grows and crawls down your screen and eventually ends up flopping down on the floor, which is both unattractive and unsanitary. Fortunately, you can smoosh (technical term) your menu into a more tractable form. Click the Show Bookmarks button and choose Show All Bookmarks (or press Ctrl+Shift+B in Windows or Command+Shift+B on a Mac) to display the Library window, which shows various kinds of items you can save.
When you create a bookmark, it appears in the Unsorted Bookmarks folder. You can click it and double-click any bookmark to see that bookmarked page. (You can leave this window open while you move around the web, or close it by clicking the X in its upper-right corner.) You can also organize your bookmarks into folders and rename your bookmarks with meaningful names — web page titles can be long and uninformative.
If you want to organize your growing list of bookmarks into folders, right-click the Bookmarks Menu folder, choose New Folder, give your folder a name, and click Add. Now you can put bookmarks into this folder, which appears as a submenu on the Bookmarks menu. Drag an item to a folder to put it in that folder’s submenu, and click a folder to display or hide that submenu. Because any changes you make in the Bookmarks sidebar are reflected immediately on the Bookmarks menu, you can easily fiddle with the bookmarks until you have them arranged as you like. Firefox starts out your bookmarks with pages that the Firefox developers want you to look at, but feel free to delete those pages if your tastes are different from theirs.
Okay, you’ve got the Bookmarks menu, which is what you see when you click the Bookmarks button. You’ve got the Library window, described in the preceding section. Wait — there’s more! The Bookmarks toolbar is a row of buttons that appears just below the Address bar. (If it doesn’t appear, right-click just above the Address bar and choose Bookmarks Toolbar from the menu that appears.) This row of buttons gives you one-button access to a bunch of Firefox developers’ favorite websites. Wouldn’t it be nice if your favorite websites appeared there instead?
No problem! When you organize your bookmarks in the Library window, drag your favorite sites into the Bookmarks Toolbar folder — any sites in this folder automagically appear on the Bookmarks toolbar. Feel free to delete the bookmarks that come with Firefox — the only one we like is the Latest Headlines bookmark, which displays a menu of breaking news stories on the BBC website.
Internet Explorer uses a URL-saving system similar to the one in Firefox, although it calls the saved URLs favorites rather than bookmarks: You can add the current page to your Favorites folder and then look at and organize your Favorites folder. If you use Windows, this Favorites folder is shared with other programs on your computer. Other programs also can add things to your Favorites folder, so it’s a jumble of web pages, files, and other elements. (To avoid insanity, most people use favorites only for web pages.)
To return to one of your favorite pages, click the Favorites icon to see a menu of your favorites, shown in Figure 7-3. Click an item to view that page. Your Favorites menu can contain folders, too, so that you can organize pages into groups; click a folder to open it and see what’s inside.
For quicker access to your top favorite pages, Internet Explorer has a Favorites bar that you can display just below the row of tabs. (If you don’t see it, right-click above the Address bar and choose Favorites Bar from the menu that appears.) Click an icon on the Favorites bar to display that page. This feature is seriously handy for websites you visit often.
If you want to reorganize your Favorites menu, click the Favorites icon, click the down arrow to the right of the Add to Favorites button, and choose Organize Favorites. In the Organize Favorites window you can move favorites around, edit them, or delete them. To see what’s in a folder, click it. When you’re done organizing your favorite items, click Close.
In the Organize Favorites window, the Favorites Bar folder contains whatever you’ve added to your Favorites bar for instant access. Drag your favorite sites and folders into this folder — any sites in this folder automagically appear on the Favorites bar. Delete any sites in the Favorites bar folder that aren’t your favorites. You can also delete icons right from the Favorites bar; right-click one and choose Delete from the menu that appears.
IE enables you to add an icon for a web page to the Windows taskbar (the icons that run along the bottom edge of your screen, with one for every running program and open document). To create an icon, click and drag a tab in Internet Explorer to the Windows taskbar.
When you drag a bookmark into the Bookmarks Bar folder, it appears (where else?) on the Bookmarks bar, between the Address bar and the top edge of the web page in the Chrome window. (If you don’t see bookmarks below the Address bar, click the Customize and Control icon, choose Tools, and choose Always Show Bookmarks Bar so that it has a check mark next to it.)
Safari comes from Apple, and Apple always does things a little differently. Unlike the other three browsers, new versions of Safari have an icon you click to show you your bookmarks, where you can then add your new bookmark. Ctrl+Command+1 also shows or hides the Bookmarks sidebar (see Figure 7-5).
The bookmarks pane has three tabs:
The Favorites section in the bookmarks are what appear on the Favorites bar, and are the buttons you see when you create a new tab, so that’s usually the best place to make a new bookmark.
To make a bookmark, click in the address bar and drag the address into the place in the bookmark pane where you want your bookmark to be. (Bet you thought it’d be more complicated.) You can also drag bookmarks up and down in the bookmarks bar to reorganize them.
Once your bookmarks are perfect, click the bookmark icon at the top of the window again to make the bookmark pane disappear.
Your page history is in the History menu at the top of the screen. Select History, then the page you want to go back to, or History⇒Show History to see your history as a page of clickable links.
The web isn’t just for reading — it’s for buying stuff, signing up for stuff, and expressing your opinion about stuff. To put your two cents into a web page, you usually fill out a form that has boxes to type in, check boxes to select, and maybe other clickable stuff. Then you click a Submit button (or a button with another name) to send in the information you entered. Figure 7-6 shows a typical form.
Text boxes in a form are white, fill-in boxes in which you type information, in this case, your name and email address. Check boxes are little square boxes in which you check whichever ones apply (all of them, we hope, on our sample form). Radio buttons, the little round buttons, are similar to check boxes except that you can choose only one of them from each set. In Figure 7-6, you also see a list box, in which you can choose one possibility in the box. In most cases, you see more entries than can fit in the box, so you scroll them up and down. You can usually choose only one entry, although some list boxes let you choose more.
Forms also include buttons that determine what happens to the information you enter on the form. Most forms have two of these buttons: one that clears the form fields to their initial state and sends nothing, and one, usually known as the Submit button, that sends the filled-out form back to the web server for processing.
Some pages have Search bars, which are one-line forms that let you type some text for which to search. Depending on the browser, a Submit button may be displayed to the right of the text area, or you may simply press Enter to send the search words to the server. For example, the Google search page at www.google.com has a box in which you type a word or phrase; when you press Enter or click the Google Search button, the search begins. (See Chapter 13 to find out what happens!)
Your browser can remember the entries, such as your name and address, that you frequently type into web page forms. As you type, your browser may try to spot entries you made earlier and suggest the rest of the entry so that you don’t have to type it. If a suggestion pops up from your browser as you’re filling in a form, you can click the suggestion to accept it. If you don’t like the suggestion, just keep typing.
When you run your browser, it displays your start page. Unfortunately, the people who make browsers usually don’t pick pages that we particularly like. Why not tell your browser to start where you want to start? You may want to start at the Yahoo! page (www.yahoo.com), which we describe in Chapter 6; or Google (www.google.com); or Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org for the English language encyclopedia); or the home page of your local newspaper. You can even start with more than one page by setting multiple start pages, and your browser can open each one in a separate tab.
The following sections show you how to set both your start page and your home page. Most people set them to the same page (or pages) anyway.
Display the page that you want to use as your start page and home page, and then follow these steps:
You see the Options dialog box, shown in Figure 7-7.
This icon may already be selected, and its settings appear in the rest of the Options dialog box. The settings you’re concerned with are in the Startup section.
You can choose Show My Home Page (you set your home page in the next step), Show a Blank Page (make Firefox start faster), or Show My Windows and Tabs from Last Time.
Display the page that you want to use as your start page and home page, and then follow these steps:
You see the Internet Options dialog box.
It’s probably already selected, but we say this in case you’ve been looking around at what’s on the other tabs.
The URL of the current page appears in the Address text box. To start with no page, click the Use Blank button.
Display the page or pages that you want to use as your home page, and then follow these steps:
You see the Settings page in a new tab. (It isn’t a web page, but it looks like one.)
If you choose the last option, you can click Set Pages to set the current page as your start page (or one of several start pages, using tabs).
If you had more than one page open, it adds all of them. If you don’t want one, mouse over it, which makes an X appear to the right of the URL, then click the X to get rid of that page.
Display the page that you want to use as your start page and home page, and then follow these steps:
You see the General dialog box. If you don’t, click the General Tab.
On a Mac, enter the URL of your home page into the Homepage box, or if you have that page open, click Set to Current Page.
You can tell Safari to display the Home icon by clicking the Settings icon above the upper-right corner of the web page, choosing Customize Toolbar, and dragging the Home icon to your Safari toolbar. (For example, you can drag it to between the Address bar and the Tools icon.)
We certainly can’t remember all our passwords. Many websites ask you to enter a username and password. If you’re buying an item from an online store such as Amazon (www.amazon.com), you create an account with a username and password that you enter every time you want to buy something. Amazon.com remembers your name, address, and credit card information as part of your account, so you don’t need to enter it every time. If you want to read the New York Times online at www.nytimes.com, you create an account with a password, too. The account remembers what kinds of news you’re interested in reading. After you use the web for a while, you pile up a heap of usernames and passwords.
Browsers offer to remember your usernames and passwords for you. Using this feature can be dangerous if other people use your computer or if you use a computer in a public place, such as a library or an Internet café. But if you’re the only person who uses your computer, you may want to let your browser do the work of remembering some, if not all, of your usernames and passwords.
When a web page asks for a username and password, your browser may pop up a little window that offers to remember the username and password you enter, or the question may appear just above the top edge of the web page. If you click Yes, the next time you arrive at the same page, your browser may fill in your username and password for you.
You can control whether and how your browser stores these passwords. In Firefox, follow these steps:
You see the Options dialog box, with a list of the categories of options across the top (refer to Figure 7-7 earlier in this chapter). On a Mac, choose Firefox⇒Preferences.
Click the box to clear the check mark if you want to turn off this feature (or click the box again to turn it back on).
You can review or delete usernames that Firefox is remembering for you. You can even see the passwords by clicking the Show Password button. (And so can anyone else with access to your computer!) Click Close when you’re done.
This option reduces the number of passwords you need to remember while maintaining some security. Don’t forget the master password.
In Internet Explorer, remembering usernames and passwords is the job of the AutoComplete feature, which you set up by following these simple steps:
You see the Content tab in the Internet Options dialog box.
You see the AutoComplete Settings dialog box.
IE doesn’t show you a list of the passwords you saved, but you can turn the feature on and off by selecting the Ask Me Before Saving Passwords check box. The User Names and Passwords On Forms check box controls whether Internet Explorer fills in your stored passwords on forms.
The Chrome settings for remembering passwords are more like those in Firefox. Follow these steps:
You see the Settings page on a new tab.
It’s your choice, depending on whether you trust the other people who use your computer.
You see web addresses and the usernames, and you can remove any you don’t want saved by clicking the X to its right. To display a password, click the dots that represent it and click Show. Click Close when you’re done.
Same old, same old — Safari works similarly to other browsers. Follow these steps:
These settings control which personal information Safari stores and then supplies on web page forms.
To enhance your online experience, browser makers invented a type of special message, known as a cookie, that lets a website recognize you when you revisit that site. They thoughtfully store this info on your very own machine. See Chapter 2 for a full description of cookies and how they compare to more serious security threats. You can control which sites can store cookies on your computer.
Usually, the website that sets a cookie is the only one that reads the cookie. However, third-party cookies can be set by one website and read by another. Third-party cookies are used by servers that deliver advertisements and those annoying pop-up and pop-under ads. We recommend that you accept most cookies but block third-party cookies.
Choose Firefox⇒Options (on a Mac Firefox⇒Preferences), click the Privacy icon, and look in the History section. If Remember History is selected, Firefox stores cookies. If you want more control over which cookies it stores, change it to Use Custom Settings for History. This setting displays these cookie-related check boxes:
You can specify which sites can and cannot store cookies by clicking the Exceptions button. You can enter the web addresses that you definitely trust with your cookies (such as the shopping sites you frequent) or that you don’t trust (such as advertising sites).
You can take a look at the cookies on your computer, too. Click the Show Cookies button and scroll down the list of sites. If you see one that you don’t recognize or that sounds suspicious, click it and click the Remove Cookie button.
Browsers keep a history list of the websites you’ve been to. No, your browser isn’t spying on you; the history list remembers pages you went to earlier, even days ago, so that you can find them again.
You can see your history list, and you can return to any page on it by clicking it. Here’s how:
Some of our readers have asked us how to clear out their browsing, presumably because they meant to type www.disney.com but their fingers slipped and it came out www.mega-xxx-babes.com instead. (It could happen to anyone.)
If you’re using someone else’s computer, and especially if you’re using a public computer in a library or Internet café, you should delete your browsing history and any other information about your session that might be stored on the computer. Otherwise, the next person to sit down at the computer might find your browsing history rather interesting, especially if the browser has thoughtfully stored the usernames and password you entered.
Whether you, um, mistyped web addresses or you don’t want to leave your personal information on someone else’s computer, follow these procedures:
Some browsers let you browse in a kind of “stealth mode,” which leaves no trace:
Pop-up windows, as described in Chapter 2, are browser windows that open without your asking for them, usually at the command of the website you’re viewing. Some websites display so many pop-ups that your computer becomes unusable until you can close them all. If you’ve encountered these sites, you’ll be glad to hear that your browser can block most (though not all) pop-up windows.
Click the Menu button and choose Options or Preferences, click the Content icon, and you see the Block Pop-up Windows check box. We leave it selected.
Blocking all pop-ups makes a few websites stop working. In particular, some shopping sites pop up small windows in which you have to type credit card verification information. Online help sometimes appears in pop-ups, too. Firefox thoughtfully includes an Exceptions button that lets you specify websites whose pop-ups are okay with you.
When a website tries to display a pop-up, you see at the top of the web page a message saying “Firefox prevented this site from opening a popup window.” Click the Options button and choose from the menu that appears:
Click the red X at the right end of the message to make the message go away.
The Internet Explorer pop-up blocker displays a “Pop-up blocked” message at the top of the web page whenever it blocks a pop-up window, and clicking the message displays a similar set of options.
Chrome includes a pop-up blocker, too. When Chrome blocks a pop-up, you see a message in the lower-right corner of the browser window. You can either click the message and choose the first option (the exact address of the pop-up) to display it or choose Always Allow Popups to allow pop-ups from the site. To set up Chrome to block all pop-ups, follow these steps:
You might have scroll to the bottom of the window.
Web pages with text and pictures are old hat. Now web pages must have pictures that sing and dance or calendars that let you create events or games such as chess that play against you. Every month, new types of information appear on the web, and browsers have to keep up. You can extend your browser’s capabilities with plug-ins — add-on programs that glue themselves to the browser and add even more features. Internet Explorer can also extend itself by using ActiveX controls, which are another (less secure) type of add-on program.
What are you to do when your browser encounters new kinds of information on a web page? Get the plug-in program that handles that kind of information and glue it to the browser program. Star Trek fans can think of plug-ins as parasitic life forms that attach themselves to your browser and enhance its intelligence.
When you restart your browser, maybe because it updated itself, it may display messages about add-ons that are installed or that need to be updated. You can display a list of your plug-ins at any time:
After you download a plug-in from the web, run it (double-click its icon or filename) to install it. Depending on what the plug-in does, you follow different steps to try it out — usually, you find a file that the plug-in can play and watch (or listen) as the plug-in plays it.
After you install the plug-in, you don’t have to do anything to run it. It fires up automatically whenever you view a web page containing information that requires the plug-in.