Setting Browser Preferences

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Setting Browser Preferences

Like your email program, you need to set your personal preferences. To do this in Netscape, go to the "Edit" menu and select "Preferences" (In Internet Explorer, you would go to "Tools" then "Internet Options." In Netscape, you should see the following window:

setpref.jpg (45803 bytes)

The left screen contains a list of categories. They are displayed in what is called a "collapsible menu." If the "plus" image () appears next to a menu item, like it does with the "Advanced" category, then there are other sub-menus listed within. To access the sub-menu, click on the plus image () to expand the menu. When expanded, the "plus" symbol will turn into a "minus" symbol () and the sub-menus will be displayed (as it does for the "Appearance" and "Navigator" categories). To collapse the menu, click on the minus symbol again.

The preferences window opened with the "Navigator" category selected. The contents of this item will be displayed in the right side of the window. As you can see from the above image, the category name appears at the top of the right side of the window and its contents are divided into four sections (labelled here as A through D). We will go through each one here.

Section A: Navigator starts with	"Navigator starts with" determines what shows up in the browser window when you first open the program. Make your selection from "blank page," "home page," or "last page visited."
Section B: Home page	There are three ways to specify your home page, which is the page that displays when you hit the "Home" button. 1) Enter the URL in the text field. URL stands for "Universal Resource Locator" and usually starts with http://... The URL for UVIC is shown in the image above. 2) Click the "Use Current Page" button will select the webpage currently displayed in your web browser. 3) Click "Browse..." and select a webpage stored on your computer. Set your homepage preference now.
Section C: History	Each time you visit a webpage, your browser inputs the information about that page and tracks it. When you click on hyperlinks, they change colour to show that you have already accessed it (i.e., an untouched blue link will change to purple once you have clicked on it). The history will maintain this information until you clear it. Specify how long you want the browser to remember where you have been. To clear history manually, click on the "clear history" button. (This button is named "expire now" on Mac OS).
Section D: Location Bar History	The location bar is the field where a URL is entered or displayed in the browser. It looks like this: This location bar has a drop-down menu, meaning that if you click on the down arrow (circled above), an expanded menu will appear containing a history of the websites you have typed in. Note that only websites that have been manually entered appear here and not those visited through bookmarks or clicking on links. To clear this list, click on the "Clear Location Bar" button.

The remaining categories and sub-categories in the preferences window will not be reviewed here. To learn more about setting preferences, go to the Help menu in your browser, select "Help Contents," then "Index" and search for the topic you are interested in. Further information is available in the browser handbooks described in the following section.

Please go to the next page on Basic Browser Operation.