Introduction | Navigating Pages | Favorites & Downloading | Printing, Saving, Editing
Finding Text, Setting Your Home Page | Cache, History, Resolution | Outside Resources

The Toolbars:
- The "Standard Buttons" toolbar is the primary way to navigate back and forth between pages, as well as refreshing and stopping the loading of pages. It has the familiar Back, Forward, Refresh, Home buttons.
- The "Address Bar" is the primary entry for URLs (uniform resource locators) to browse to pages.
- The "Links" bar contains preset links to websites, and can be altered for one-click access to your favorite sites.

Visiting a Web Page:
When the program is opened each time, (provided an Internet connection is available) it will automatically load up what is set to the "Home Page." This is a page that is saved within IE, and can be changed (see later in tutorial).

To visit a specific site, you will need to know the URL ("Uniform Resource Locator") for that site; this is also sometimes simply referred to as the website's "address." URLs are an easy way to remember, for example, the location of a company online. A computer's location on the web is its IP address. This is a series of numbers that pinpoints just where the computer is. But IP addresses are hard to remember (ex: 255.6.90.100). When you use an URL, the browser looks up that address and translates it to IP.

Once IE is open and running, you can visit any site you wish by clicking in the address bar (or pressing Ctrl + Tab), and entering in the URL of the site you wish to visit (for example, "http://www.google.com" is the URL for the search engine Google; "http://nbp.rutgers.edu" is the URL for Rutgers University's New Brunswick/Piscataway campus main page). After entering in the URL, simply hit "Enter" on the keyboard, or click the "Go" button to the immediate right of the address bar.

Navigating a Page:
Web pages will generally contain "links," which when clicked, bring you either to a different portion of the site, a file to view, or to a different site all together. A link can be either text or an image; links will generally be noted by blue text or an underline, or will change colors if the cursor is placed over it. By simply placing your cursor over a link (without yet clicking it), you will notice in the bottom left-hand corner of IE, the address of the file linked to will appear as text (for example, on the Rutgers University main page, by placing the cursor over the words "The University" in the "About" section, you will see the link pointing to "http://ruweb.rutgers.edu/about-the-university.shtml"). By clicking that link, the browser will then open the file you have clicked.

Links that go to files with extensions such as .htm, .html, .shtml, .jhtml, and their variants will bring you to another web page. Notice what the file extension of a link is before you click it; any files can be linked to online. While the vast majority will be other web pages (and images), you may come across files such as .zip, and .exe. Be aware of what it is, exactly, that you are clicking. For more information, view the tutorial dealing with viruses.

Many pages will be longer than what there is room for on the screen (some may be wider, but this is rare). To continue viewing this material on the page, simply use the scroll bars at the far right and bottom of the screen, indicated by the triangles, to move back and forth along the page.

If you wish to bring your browser back to a page you were previously at, rather than attempting to find a link on your current page, you can click the "Back" button on the "Standard Button" toolbar to go back one page. Also, by clicking the tiny downwards triangle next to this button, you can choose from approximately ten sites, in chronological order of your visiting, to go "back" to. If you wish to then go forward, again, you can use the "Forward" button the same way as the "Back" button.

If you wish to stop the loading of any web page for any reason, click the "Stop" button. If you then wish to reload the page (or to check and see if any changes have been made to a page since your last visit), click the "Refresh" button (also on the standard button toolbar).

>> next