John F. Kennedy said “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” How true this is. Change can be subtle and virtually unnoticed, such as when we age. We simply wake up one morning, look in the mirror and wonder who is staring back. Sometimes change hits us like a freight train. Hurricane Charley is a good example. In a matter of hours, Charlotte County and Punta Gorda made changes that probably would have taken decades by any other method. Stores we used to shop at were gone. Vacant lots sprang up like weeds in our yards. But even that began to change. New stores, new homes, new roofs all began to flower as though from a freshly tilled garden. In a few years, we will barely remember the way it used to be.
Many computer users have also noticed a change recently. Up till a few months ago, we would dutifully say yes whenever Microsoft notified us of an update that was available to download and install. For the most part the changes were behind the scenes, closing security flaws or patching some code that wasn’t quite right. One day an update is announced, we unquestionably download and install it. At the end of the installation we are prompted to restart our computer. Here comes the desktop, and we prepare to surf the Internet. Probably didn’t even notice that our big blue Internet Explorer icon has a gold band around it now that wasn’t there before. And then the window opens and WHAT! It’s changed. Where is everything? Where oh where is my old Internet Explorer 8? How could they do this to me?
Take a deep breath. Sit back in the chair for a moment. Close your eyes and picture the old Professional building in Punta Gorda, ugly but functional. Now picture the new Sunloft building, beautiful and even more functional. IE9 is just that. It looks slicker, it is organized better in presenting to the user the features they actually use and it has some pretty neat bells and whistles that didn’t exist before. And before you break down and cry, please remember that everything that was in the old IE8 is still available in IE9.
Let’s look at IE9 as it comes out of the box then we can try to personalize the way it works to fit our expectations.
The first thing we'll notice when we open Internet Explorer 9 is the simplified design. We can find most command bar functions, like Print or Zoom, when we click the Tools button , and our favorites and feeds appear in Favorites Center when we click the Favorites button .
Next, take a look in the upper right hand corner. There is no longer a small search box there. Type in something in the URL bar and the default search provider will search the web and bingo it takes us right to it. The nice thing is that we can control the default search engine. If we don’t do anything the default will be Microsoft’s Bing. If we prefer Yahoo or Google or any other of the myriad search engines just click on the little down arrow next to the search field and select “Change Search Defaults.” Now to un-clutter the window you can uninstall all the toolbars by Google, My Web Search, Yahoo etc., because it is now built into IE9. Another missing item in the standard install of IE9 is the button on the toolbar that allows us to call up our email program. To get it back just right click on an empty area near the top of the browser and from the menu put a check mark next to Command Bar. One of the toolbars I recommend is the Status Bar which appears at the bottom of the browser window. While we are there we can add the Menu Bar making our browser more IE8 like and why not add the Favorites Bar. (Martha, it sounds like a martini shop)
There are many other features that are new and very helpful. IE9 opens web pages in tabs. So to have multiple web pages open doesn’t require the opening of IE9 over and over, simply open a new tab and type the address in the URL address bar or click on one of our favorites and there it is without closing the previous tab. Because of multiple tabs a user may have more than one home page that will open up when we start the program. When I open IE9, my Yahoo page opens in one tab, my Hotmail opens in another and my website www.bitsandbytesonline.com in a third. There are many other neat features that I’ll cover in future columns.
I wonder what the future will bring when IE10 arrives shortly.
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Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books
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Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books
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