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This week’s tech tip started out as a follow-up of the one we did recently on browser hijacking. A common trick of browser hijackers and other self-centred, short-sighted webmasters is to disable the Back button on your browser, so that it just keeps reloading the page you didn’t want to go to in the first place. Of course you’ll need to get rid of the hijacker program, as we covered in the earlier tip, but first you probably want to finish your mission of whatever you were doing on the web to start with.

If you happen to remember it, you can always type in the URL of the site you want to return to, but there is a quicker and more convenient way to do it for anyone using Internet Explorer. Last time we checked, IE was the browser of choice for most of the known world, and the handful who used Mozilla were writing their own tech tips anyway.

If you right-click on your IE browser’s Back button, a pop-up list will display all of the sites you’ve visited since the browser was last opened. Just click on the one you want, and slip right out of the hijacker’s clutches. If you’ve already backed up a few steps, you can also right-click the Forward button and select from the list rather than marching forward one site at a time.

To see an even longer list of visited sites, use the browser’s History button. Just how much longer depends on the number of days set in the Internet Properties window, which you can access by right-clicking the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop. A third option is to click the down-pointing arrow at the right-hand end of the browser’s address bar. This list only contains the sites where you typed in the address though, not the ones you found by surfing the links.

Google Toolbar

While we are on the subject of browsing, have you downloaded Google’s free toolbar yet? This just may be the single most effective thing you can do to enhance your browsing experience. For one thing, this toolbar gives you instant access to Google’s search function, no matter where on the web you happen to be. But wait, there’s more!

Click to Enlarge

A free pop-up blocker function is included with the toolbar. This doesn’t stop the pop-ups that you activate by clicking on a link, but it does block those pesky ones that appear automatically and that you then have to close to continue about your business. And the toolbar contains a counter to remind you of just how many of these annoyances you have been spared. Personally, the pop-up blocker has done wonders for my blood pressure, and all by itself was worth many times the purchase price. But that’s not all!

There is a button for one-click blogging (web logging), which allows you to post to the currently open web page. The on-line world appears to be divided between those who consider blogging to be the most significant communication breakthrough of the new millennium, and those who wonder how these bloggers seem to have so much more spare time than the rest of us. So far the bloggers are gaining, and if you’re one of them, the Google toolbar has a button just for you. But wait!

Yes, there’s more! No, it doesn’t come with a set of Ginsu knives, but it does have a box that will tell you how Google ranks the importance of the current page, on a scale of 0-10, and based, I believe, on the number of links to the page from other sites. Webmasters and marketing managers tend to obsess over Google rankings while everyone else ignores the issue, and the importance ranking doesn’t necessarily coincide with placement in the search. Depending on the search terms used, it’s entirely possible for the top spot to be occupied by a site that Google ranks as zero importance. Go figure. In any case, whether you use all of the toolbar’s features or not, the whole toolbar package is FREE. And you can download it from: http://toolbar.google.com/.

Internet Explorer Version 6

IE 6 has a new feature called the Image Toolbar, and it pops up when your mouse pointer rests over an image on a web page, provided that the image does not contain a hyperlink. The toolbar’s first three buttons allow you to Save the image, Print it or E-mail it, and the fourth button opens your My Pictures directory. These same features can found on a menu by right-clicking the image, but when sites block the ability to save an image from the menu, the toolbar bypasses the blockage and let’s you save it anyway. One drawback of the Image Toolbar is that it does obscure part of the image, and for some people the convenience is not as important as seeing the whole picture. If that’s true for you, just right-click on the toolbar next time it pops up, and then click on Disable Image Toolbar.

Another Internet Explorer feature that is a help to some people and a handicap to others is the image Auto Resize feature. If graphic loads that is larger than the browser window, IE automatically resizes it to fit in the window. To disable this, open the browser and select Internet Options from the Tools menu. On the Advanced tab, uncheck the box that says Enable Automatic Image Resizing.

That’s it for this week. Happy browsing.

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