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Read the following maddingly profound sentence.
Over thar, thar is a car, nestled on the pavement, under yon star.
Besides being sheer poetry in non-motion, you're reading those words on this page within a rectangular form on your computer screen. Gaze upon that now... the menu at the top (perhaps File | Edit | View | Favorites or File | Edit | View | Go or File | Edit | View | Bookmarks or ...)
Have you located these menus yet? Great! Do you use them regularly? No? Not great! Why? Because your browser offers you big bunches of shortcuts in which you can revel to ease your Internet surfing.
Before You Begin - Bookmarks, Toolbars, and Find Word, Oh My!
Think of your browser toolbar as your dashboard to simplicity. What kind of simplicity, I hear you inquire? Glad you asked! The kind that makes surfing, well, just plain easier.
In today's "must have beeyons of customers use my software" world, many portals such as Google, Yahoo, eBay, etc. offer toolbar bundles that let you directly access their services without directly going to their site. Not only that - the browser menu itself lets you easily search for words within a page (most useful if the page has 9,473 words contained), increase or decrease the text size (did you know you could change how big the words look on your page?) and much much more. So let's begin with some of the easiest builtin options, and work our way up from there.
Step 1 - Find Words And Make 'Em Big
Go to your browser menu on the top of the page and choose Edit and then Find (hereby denoted by Edit | Find. A popup might appear that lets you search for words, or a textfield might show up on the bottom of your browser.
Type in
Clarity Commander
and click, Find Now. You should be brought to this section. Neat, huh? But let's now say the type is just too tiny. Wait a sec, let me smoosh it as much as possible on my end....
Clarity Commander
There! It should be relatively tiny compared to the rest of the page.
Now! Go to the menu option View and choose Text Size. (IMPORTANT! Take note of the current setting!) Now, select Largest and look back at that "Clarity Commander."
You should see that Clarity Commander font increase. Now go back and reset your text size to what you feel comfortable with. Isn't that neat?
Your browser's menu is chock full of such goodies. Let's now take another useful aspect - your bookmarks or favorites.
Step 2 - Bookmarks or Favorites and Toolbars Oh My, Part II
Every now and then, you'll visit a site so supercool and helpful that you'll want to easily remember it for future reference. Every browser has the ability to "bookmark" or "make a favorite" in the browser menu. You can either choose Bookmark and then Bookmark This Page (or Favorites and then Add to Favorites if you're using Internet Explorer).
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Now go to your Bookmarks or Favorites menu item at the top of your browser, click on it, and see if "Owlbert Shares - Browser Tips" is listed. Neat, huh? You can use this ability to keep track of all the great sites you visit...and even categorize them into useful folders! But I'll get to that later.
Do you realize your browser is simply a piece of software you use on a daily basis.... but one so important, you're using it almost all the time you're online?
Deep, huh? But there's a method to my madness of pointing this out....if you're always using your browser, bigname portal companies want to make certain their services are staring at you as much as possible. Enter Toolbars.
Toolbars can be the most magnificent creations on the face of this planet (with only a weee bit of exaggerations) or the kiss of doom. You must be very careful to only use toolbars from reputable companies!. Other toolbars will download spyware and other ickness to your computer.
But I digress.
I for one use Google as my search engine. Therefore, I have the Google toolbar as part of my browser - I don't have to visit the site in order to search. Other services like eBay allow you to grab information from their site without actually visiting it. That one is also quite useful!
A general list of toolbars can be found here.
Direct downloads include:
It bears repeating, however....always make certain you know and trust the toolbar company you're considering! Here are two resources about rogue viral toolbars:
Step 3 - For More Information
As always, an educated Internet user is the safest online! Check out:
- Intenet Explorer Tips - neat resources if you're using IE
- Opera Tips - useful Opera tips
- Firefox Tips - tips and tricks for Firefox
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