Setting Browser Preferences

Are you still using Internet Explorer? Have you tried Firefox yet? If not give it a try. In the meantime, I wanted to talk a little bit about setting some of the preferences for whatever browser you are using.

In IE (Internet Explorer) from the menu bar select TOOLS then select INTERNET OPTIONS. You will see a window with lots of tabs, the first one being GENERAL. So what can you do here? The first thing you can do is set up your home page. This is the page that will appear every time you click on your IE icon to go to the web. I highly recommend that you set your home page to http://www.durhamcountylibrary.org – but I’m just saying! You can set your home page to just about anything you like, just type in the address or URL of your home page. Click on APPLY and OK and you are done. Click on the little house button in your toolbar and you will be taken to your homepage.

Another thing you can do on the GENERAL tab is to deal with Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, and your browsing History.

Temporary Internet Files are just that, files that are loaded into a temporary folder on your computer when you visit a website.  Click on the SETTINGS button. The first thing you see here is how often to “Check for newer versions of stored pages.” This feature works with the Temporary Internet Files to save you time when you go to a web site. If it is set to Never, your browser will use your temporary files and show you that version of the website. If the site has been changed or updated, you won’t see those changes. I have mine set to Every visit to the page. This assures that when I go back to a site I’ve been to before, I’ll get the newest version.

Next thing on the settings window to look at is the Temporary Internet files folder. You can see the location of the folder and the amount of disk space your computer computer has alloted for these files. Mine is set to 50MB, plenty of room!

Now click on VIEW FILES. If you are like me and have your Cookies turned on – you should see lots of files there. Close that window, click on OK and go back to the General Tab. You can delete all of those files you just saw, and the cookies by clicking on Delete Cookies and Delete Files. It’s okay to do this and select Delete all offline content when you delete the files.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is the History. This is a helpful option you probably didn’t even know about. Go back to IE and click on the little down arrow at the far right side of the address bar. That is your History list. It you go back now to your Internet Options you can see how many days of history are there. Mine is set to three, but I push that Clear History button pretty often. After you push it and go back to IE and look again at the little down arrow, you will see nothing.

If you are sharing computer with someone knowing this information may come in handy. It’s not my job to judge, but I’m sure if you think about it, you can probably see advantages and disadvantages to the History, Temporary Internet Files and Cookies options. You can clean yours up as you like. I’ll talk about more of these Internet Options in my upcoming posts. — Jill