Tips for Internet Explorer 7

Regain the Familiar Windows Menu
By default, IE 7 does away with the familiar menu row (File, Edit, View, and so on) found at the top of nearly every Windows application. But it's still available, if you want it—just right-click anywhere in the toolbar area and select Menu Bar to display it.


Multiple Tabs, not Multiple Sessions
One of the biggest benefits of IE 7 is its belated support for tabbed browsing. Instead of opening multiple instances of the browser to have several Web pages open at once, simply click on the blank tab to the right of your current open window. Or hit Ctrl+T on your keyboard to activate a new tab.


Open Several Home Pages at Once
As in Firefox, IE 7 lets you have multiple home pages--so you don't have to play favorites between CNN.com and Woot.com. Under the Tools menu, select Internet Options. On the General tab, type in several URLs in the "Home page" dialog, each on its own line. When you open IE, all those pages will launch, each in its own tab.


Group Favorites Together
Similarly, you can designate a group of favorites (say, all the news sites you check each day) and launch them all at once. To create such a group, open all the sites you want to be associated in separate tabs of a single IE session. Then click on the Add to Favorites icon, select Add Tab Group to Favorites, and give it a name. Then click on the Favorites Center icon, scroll to the bookmark, and click on the blue arrow to open all the links in one browser window.


Jumping From Tab to Tab
Just as the Alt+Tab keystroke combo lets you quickly jump from one open Windows application to the next, Ctrl+Tab lets you move from one open IE tab to the next. You can also jump to a specific tab by hitting Ctrl and then a number. (For example, Ctrl+1 opens the far-left tab, Ctrl+3 opens the third tab, and so on.)


Import Bookmarks From Other Browsers
IE 7 welcomes former users back into the fold by letting you import favorites, feeds, and even cookies from other browsers. Chose Import and Export from the File menu to launch the Import/Export wizard. Note: For more obscure browsers (such as SeaMonkey), you may need to export your favorites list to an HTML file first.


Treat Pop-Ups Equally
By default, IE 7 will display allowed pop-ups in a new browser session if the requesting page specifies its size or display requirements. But you can force pop-ups to display in a new tab, rather than a separate window. Go to Tools > Internet Options, click on the General tab, and select the Tabs section. Click on Settings, and choose your preferred action under "When a popup is encountered."


Easy Zoom
IE 7 lets you zoom in or out on a given Web page, and it will resize the text and graphics on the fly. If you use a wheel mouse, hold down the Ctrl key and roll the wheel forward to zoom in, backward to zoom out. You can also use the Ctrl+ and Ctrl- key combos (Control and the plus or minus key) to zoom. Also, Ctrl+0 resets the size to 100 percent, or you can choose a zoom level from the Page menu.


Limit Your Cache Outlay
IE 6 set its default cache size to a percentage of your hard drive, which could be an enormous amount of space given today's massive hard drives. IE 7 tops out its cache at 1GB by default, though that's still big enough to cause slowdowns as it fills up. To set your own cache limit, click Tools > Internet Options, select the General tab, and click the Settings button under "Browsing history." Set your cache size under "Disk space to use" to no more than 250MB.


Scroll at a Crawl?
If your mouse scroll wheel, which worked perfectly well under IE 6, is slow to respond when scrolling in IE 7, try downloading and installing the latest driver from the mouse manufacturer. Some users have reported this issue, and an updated driver seems to do the trick.