Part 4 Advantages of IE8

Decode the Status Bar

The Status Bar that appears at the bottom of the browser window shows all the information that may not be labeled anywhere else. The unlabeled boxes of the Status Bar have some functions that can be activated by single clicking or by double-clicking. Main functions of these boxes are:

• Box 1: it performs no operation.
• Box 2: used to modify the settings of the Pop-up Blocker.
• Box 3: used to manage the Add-ons screen.
• Box 4: This contains icon in it and is used to see a Privacy Report by double clicking that can list all the blocked cookies.
• Box 5: used to provide IE to look for a security certificate.
• Box 6: it can be used to view the menu by Single-clicking where a safety check can be run on the site that the user is visiting with the help of Microsoft’s Smart Screen Filter service.

Customizing the Interface

The IE6 browser and its earlier versions allowed the easy tweaking of the toolbars that are at the top of browser window. It also makes adding and removing of the toolbar buttons, increasing or decreasing of the text size, and moving of the toolbars around very easy. But most of this customizability was then removed in the IE7 and it had just few small tweaks.  But the toolbars of the IE8 are highly customizable.

These toolbars can be unlocked by right clicking them in the context menu that generally pops up. After that you need to uncheck the “Lock the Toolbars” option. This enables the full customization options. Besides this, web content hiding can also be done on these toolbars by right clicking the context menu, and then uncheck the required toolbars. To rearrange the toolbars all you need to do is just to grab the vertical line on to the left of the toolbar, and then drag and drop it at the required place.

Tweaking the appearance of the toolbars

When there are Large Icons that toggles over the toolbar from their standard size and move to large and back then there is tweaking. If there is presence of the all Text Labels then this means that the text is appearing on the command buttons in form of the graphical icons on the toolbars. If you are using the Selective Text then that means all the icons can be seen without the text for the obvious commands, like Home, Back, Refresh, Stop, etc. the Show Only Icons is used to remove the labels of the text altogether.

Besides this, the Stop and Refresh buttons can be shifted on to the left of the Address Bar. You can select the Add or Remove Commands, and can also add or remove the functions from the Command Bar.

Customization of the Command Bar in the IE8 has been introduced only a few months ago, but it has been set as the default browser in the Windows 7 and therefore is a recommended update in some other versions of the Windows as well.