To view a Web page in a full-screen view, maximizing the amount of the page you can see, choose View→Full Screen, or press the F11 key. Full Screen mode hides everything except your Web page and the Standard toolbar. Even the Windows Taskbar is temporarily hidden. (To pull it back into view, move the cursor over the bottom edge of the screen). You can still scroll the page, using the tricks described on Section 11.4; meanwhile, you get to see much more of each Web page on each screenful.

To turn off Full Screen mode, click the Restore button at the top right of the window, or press F11. To make even the toolbar hidden (except when you move the cursor over the top edge of the screen), right-click the toolbar and choose Auto Hide from the shortcut menu.

If you find the text on a Web page too small or too big, change the text size using the View→Text Size submenu.

When you first open it, Internet Explorer displays the Standard Buttons toolbar, Address bar, Links toolbar, and (at the bottom of the window) the Status bar. All of these toolbars and other screen doodads give you plenty of surfing control, but also occupy huge chunks of your screen space. The Web is supposed to be a visual experience; this encroachment of your monitor's real estate isn't necessarily a good thing.

To add or remove toolbars, choose their names from the View→Toolbars submenu. To rearrange toolbars, drag the small vertical line to the left of the toolbar you want to move to a new location (horizontally, vertically, or both). You can hide the Status bar, too, by choosing View→Status Bar; likewise, use the View→Explorer Bar submenu to hide the Explorer bars, if they're open.

Adding buttons to the toolbar for features you frequently use streamlines your Web browsing. On the other hand, getting rid of unwanted buttons reduces clutter and opens screen real estate, allowing you to put more than one toolbar on the same line or add some shortcuts to the Links toolbar.

To customize Internet Explorer's Standard Buttons toolbar, right-click it and choose Customize from the shortcut menu. The Customize Toolbar dialog box appears; Figure 11-11 shows you how to proceed from there. (Click Reset to undo your changes, or click Close to save them.)

Figure 11-11. In the Available Toolbar Buttons list on the left, select a button you want to include on the toolbar, and then click Add. To reposition a highlighted button in the right-side list, click Move Up or Move Down. To insert a separator line between buttons, organizing them into groups, add a Separator from the left-side list. Use the two drop-down list boxes below the list to control how toolbar text and icons appear.

Graphics are part of what makes the Web so compelling. But they're also responsible for making Web pages take so long to arrive on the screen. If you do serious reading and research on the Web, you can get frustrated by the amount of time it takes for a page to open.

You can greatly speed up the process by turning off the graphics, so that only text is downloaded. You still get fully laid-out Web pages; you still see all the text and headlines. But wherever a picture would normally be, you see an empty rectangle containing a generic "graphic goes here" logo, often with a caption that tells you what that graphic would have been.

To bring about this arrangement, choose Tools→Internet Options, click the Advanced tab, and scroll down to the Multimedia heading. Clear the Show Pictures checkbox. (You can also clear the Play Animations, Play Sounds, and Play Videos checkboxes to block these enemies of downloading speed as well.) Click OK when you're done. Now try visiting a few Web pages; you'll feel a substantial speed boost.

And if you wind up on a Web page that's nothing without its pictures, you can choose to summon an individual picture. Just right-click its box and choose Show Picture from the shortcut menu.

To help speed the process of loading pages you've already seen, Internet Explorer saves the contents of every page you visit onto your hard drive. When you revisit a site, the saved file is opened—fast—thus eliminating the time-consuming process of downloading the contents again.

These saved-up Web-page files are called cache files. Internet Explorer stashes its cache in the C:→WINNT→Documents and Settings→[Your Name]→Local Settings→Temporary Internet Files folder. This folder has a limited capacity, which you can adjust (see Figure 11-12); Windows deletes older files automatically to make room for new files.

Figure 11-12. If it's important that pages be as up-to-date as possible (at the expense of browsing speed), select "Every visit to the page." If you have a very bad Internet connection, you may want to select Never, so that Internet Explorer always loads pages from the cache, if possible. Use the slider to change the maximum size of the folder, or use the View Files or View Objects button to view the pages or programs stored in the folder.

There are a couple downsides to the Temporary Internet Files scheme. First, caching Web pages and files on your hard drive reduces the space available for other programs and files; second, it leaves a record of what files and pages you've viewed.

If you want to delete all the files in the Temporary Internet Files folder, thereby temporarily freeing up some hard drive space (until the cache fills up again) and removing local traces of the files you've viewed, choose Tools→Internet Options, and then click the Delete Files button near the middle of the dialog box. The Delete Files dialog box appears; if you want to also delete any offline content you have stored (pages or files you've made available for viewing when you're not connected to the Net), select the Delete Offline Content checkbox. Click OK.

To change the amount of disk space that's allotted to the Temporary Internet Files folder, or how often Internet Explorer checks the Internet for new versions of files and pages stored in the cache, choose Tools→Internet Options, and then click the Settings button in the Temporary Internet Files section to display the dialog box shown in Figure 11-12.

The History folder, while extremely valuable for finding Web pages you've previously visited, can also be incriminating. If you don't want your spouse to know about those models you've been drooling over (Maseratis and Jaguars, for example), clear the History folder as well as the record of addresses you've entered in the Address Bar. Choose Tools→Internet Options, and then click the Clear History button.

Cookies are small text file files that some Web sites store on your computer. A cookie might help the Web page remember, for example, your name, password, or credit card number, to spare you the retyping every time you visit a certain Web page. It can't do anything else—it can't give you a virus or take any information that you don't provide willingly.

If you ever switch computers, you can transfer all your old cookies so that the Web sites you visit will still remember you. To do this, choose File→Import and Export, click Next, choose either Import Cookies or Export Cookies, and click Next. Choose the browser or file you want to import from or export to, click Next, and then click Finish.

If you want to view the cookies stored on your computer, choose Tools→Internet Options, and then click the Settings button in the Temporary Internet Files section to display the box shown in Figure 11-12. Click the View Files button to open your Temporary Internet Files folder. Inside this folder, you'll see a list of files; at the top of the list are your cookies. You can delete cookies just as you'd delete any file.

Internet Explorer and Windows 2000 let you and your company place every Web site on earth into four categories, called security zones:

Each zone, or category, can have its own security settings that control what Web sites and network locations belonging to the zone can and can't do.

For example, sites in the Restricted Sites zone can't run ActiveX programs (mini-programs that your computer downloads from Web sites), download files, or store cookies on your computer. To adjust the security settings, choose Tools→Internet Options and then click the Security tab (Figure 11-13).

Figure 11-13. Highlight a zone to view the security settings for that zone. To change the security settings, move the slider to the desired security level, or to change individual security settings, click the Custom Level button and use the Security Settings dialog box to configure individual settings. To add sites to the Trusted Sites or Restricted Sites zones, select the zone, click the Add Sites button, enter the Web address for the site in the provided box, and click Add.

As noted earlier in this chapter, Internet Explorer's AutoComplete feature memorizes the information you enter in Web-page forms (such as your name, address, credit card number, and so on). The next time you begin typing one of these information tidbits, AutoComplete kicks in, automatically filling in the remaining letters. This feature can make filling out order forms and logging onto password-protected Web sites faster and easier (because you won't have to memorize your passwords or how to spell your name).

AutoComplete entries are encrypted on your hard drive, so other network citizens can't gain access to, say, your bank account Web site—unless somebody sits down at your PC when you're away and have forgotten to log off.

To change AutoComplete settings, see Figure 11-14. You can delete a specific AutoComplete entry in a Web form, too: When the list of AutoComplete entries appears (when you're entering data in the form, or when you press the down arrow key in a form field with an AutoComplete entry), select the entry you want to delete and press the Delete key on your keyboard.

Figure 11-14. Choose Tools→Internet Options, click the Content tab, and then click the AutoComplete button. In the AutoComplete Settings dialog box, select what you'd like to use AutoComplete for—addresses in the Address bar, Web page forms, or user names and passwords on Web page forms. To clear all stored form entries, click the Clear Forms button; to clear stored passwords only, click Clear Passwords.

The Microsoft Profile Assistant can store all your personal information (name, address, and so on). Microsoft's engineers imagined that one day, specially programmed Web sites could "ask" Internet Explorer for information from your profile, in an effort to save you some typing. Internet Explorer would respond by telling you what information is being requested, and asking your permission to share it with the Web page. (To change the information in your profile, choose Tools→Internet Options, click the Content tab, and then click My Profile.)

Unfortunately, the Profile Assistant feature hasn't caught on; very few Web sites have been made "Profile Assistant-aware."