Cool Features and Tips For IE 9

Internet Explorer 9 is Microsoft's new version of it's popular web browser. Learn new tips and tricks to make your web surfing more enjoyable.

Where is the menu?

In an effort to save screen real estate and mimick the look and feel of other modern day web browsers, Internet Explorer 9 by default has hidden it's toolbars. While this may seem to be an inconvenience to some (it is for me at least), you can bring enable the menu if you prefer.

To bring it up, type the ALT button on your keyboard. This will bring up the menu just underneath the URL address bar. Type ALT again and it will go away. If you want it to stay permanently enabled, select View | Toolbars | Menu.

Are You Missing Your Status ToolBar Too?

Sometimes you may want to see where those hyperlinks go before you click on them. By default, the status toolbar is turned off. To turn it on, go to the View | Toolbars | Status bar and enable it.

The Command ToolBar Is Your Friend

The command toolbar puts up icons to make your life easier. Here you can change the default home page, enable hand panning (more on this below), read your RSS feeds, and get quick access to your page, safety settings and tools. In addition you can add your own commands to get quick access to your most often used actions. In the screen shot below, I've enabled text resizing, view source code, delete browsing history, the zoom feature, and InPrivate browsing..

The Amazing Panning Hand

If you ever used Adobe Acrobat Reader before, you might remember a useful feature that keeps you from having to move the mouse to the vertical scrollbar and pull down everytime to read more of a page. IE 9 has a feature that lets you left click on a web page and drag up and down to scroll. For people with large monitors, this is a great feature!

Now Show Your Browser Tabs In A Seperate Row

This is useful if you have a monitor that doesn't have a large screen resolution and can't fit all your tabs on the screen. It places all tabs across one row right under the URL address bar.

Simply right click in the area right above the back button. Choose Show Tabs on a separate row.and you will see all your tabs with icons and a partial description of the website in one row.

Explorer Bar Views

IE 9 has three explorer bars that can display views of the following:

• Favorites - Your bookmarks
• Feeds - RSS feeds
• History - Recent websites you visited

RSS Feeds

Internet Explorer 9 can now be used as your RSS feed reader. Simply visit a website with an RSS feed and IE 9 will attempt to discover the feed URLs. Then, categorize and add them to your Feed Explorer Bar.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Some quick keyboard shortcuts to make your browsing faster.

OneBox Is Now Your Address Bar

You once knew it as Address Bar. But its name has changed and so has it's functionality. It's now called "OneBox", and not only can you type in a web address to get to your websites but you can also type in text to search.

Pin Your Websites

Want a quick way to get to your popular websites? Simply visit the site, and drag and drop the icon in the address bar (OneBox) to the task bar to pin it. When you want to visit the site again, just click on the icon and away you go.

About Kerry Kobashi

Kerry is the founder of KerryOnWorld. He lives in Silicon Valley and has worked as an engineer and project manager. He owns Kobashi Computing a consulting company.