Personalizing Internet Explorer (part 2) - Managing Toolbars, Managing and Troubleshooting Add-ons & Using (or Refusing) AutoComplete

3. Managing Toolbars

To show or hide any toolbar, click Tools, click Toolbars, and finally select the name of the toolbar in the menu; a check mark indicates that the toolbar is currently visible.

Internet Explorer does not require you to stick with the default spatial layout of its toolbars. To rearrange the toolbars, you first have to unlock them: click Tools, click Toolbars, and finally clear the check mark to the left of the Lock The Toolbars option. When toolbars are unlocked, a dotted handle appears to the left of each toolbar. Drag a handle to move the associated toolbar. When you have things the way you want them, lock the toolbars again.

To make more efficient use of space, you can put two or more toolbars on a single line. If all buttons or menu choices on a toolbar don't fit in the space allotted to them, Internet Explorer displays a chevron to indicate that additional options are available. Click the chevron to display the remaining choices in a drop-down list.

To change the contents of the Command bar, select Tools, Toolbars, Customize to display the dialog box shown in Figure 3. To add a button, select it from the Available Toolbar Buttons list and click Add; to remove a currently visible button, select its entry in the Current Toolbar Buttons list and click Remove. Select any button and click Move Up or Move Down to change the button's order in the list. This option allows you to move the buttons you use most often to the left, where they're most likely to be visible even if a portion of the toolbar is truncated.

4. Managing and Troubleshooting Add-ons

Browser add-ons—toolbars, browser helper objects, and ActiveX controls—can be a mixed blessing. On the plus side, browser helper objects and toolbars allow you to greatly extend the capabilities of Internet Explorer. The down side is that a poorly written (or deliberately hostile) add-on can be deleterious to performance and security and, in extreme examples, can cause the browser to crash or become unstable.

If you happen to start Internet Explorer with an add-on that is known to cause problems, you will typically see a message similar to the following:

This can happen if the add-on was designed to run with an earlier version of Internet Explorer but is incompatible with the current version. (In this case, for example, the add-on was installed by version 3.8 of the popular communications program from Skype Technologies; replacement with version 4.0 solved the problem.) You can open the browser with the add-on disabled by choosing the second option in this dialog box.

If Internet Explorer does not detect a troublesome add-on at startup but you suspect that an add-on is causing problems—sluggish performance, for example, or unwanted behavior of some kind—you might be able to verify your suspicion by starting Internet Explorer with all add-ons disabled. To do this, open the Start menu and choose All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Internet Explorer (No Add-Ons). (It might be quicker to type iexplore.exe – extoff in the Start menu search box.)

From within Internet Explorer (running normally or with add-ons off), you can inspect the browser's current list of add-ons by choosing Tools, Manage Add-Ons. In the Manage Add Ons dialog box, select Toolbars And Extensions, and then choose one of these options:

• Currently Loaded Add-Ons Add-ons that have been called by a website during your current browsing session (this choice is not available if you run Internet Explorer with add-ons disabled)

• Run Without Permission Add-ons that were installed without your active participation, typically by the operating system, your hardware vendor, or an application

• Downloaded Controls ActiveX controls that you have downloaded

• All Add-Ons All of the above

Figure 4 shows an example of what you might see with all add-ons displayed. Note that the list includes many columns (right-click a heading and choose Columns to see a list of possibilities) and is sorted by publisher (right-click a heading and choose Sort By to see other sorting options). If you sort by publisher and have any add-ons that have not been digitally signed, the unverified add-ons appear at the top of the list. If you're not sure what add-on is causing trouble, you might want to begin your investigation with these.

In the bottom portion of the dialog box, you can click Disable (or Enable, if the selected add-on is currently disabled), or click More Information to see additional details and recent usage data:

By selectively disabling suspicious add-ons, you can usually ferret out any bad passengers that might have come aboard. Unfortunately, the only items that you can actually delete via Manage Add-Ons are ActiveX controls that you have downloaded. To remove another kind of add-on, you need to find the program that originally installed it and then remove that program.

5. Using (or Refusing) AutoComplete

Internet Explorer's AutoComplete features can help reduce keystrokes by remembering URLs you type, data you enter into web forms, logon names, and passwords. As you begin entering data in a field on a web form, AutoComplete consults its list of previous entries and proposes possible matches—thereby reducing the amount of typing you have to do. Likewise, when Internet Explorer detects matching user name and password fields on a webpage, it asks if you want to save the data as a matched pair. If you click Yes, the values you enter are encrypted and saved in the registry.

Not everyone welcomes this kind of assistance, though. Depending on your preferences and your level of caution, you might want to use all, none, or only some of the browser's AutoComplete services.

To enable or disable AutoComplete options, click Tools, Internet Options, click the Content tab, and then click Settings in the AutoComplete section of the dialog box. In the ensuing dialog box (shown in Figure 5), you can select any or all of the following check boxes:

• Address Bar This option, with its subordinate options, controls the Smart address bar .

• Forms This option enables auto-completion of data that you type into webpages, such as the names and shipping addresses that you supply on e-commerce sites.

• User Names And Passwords On Forms When this option is selected, Internet Explorer remembers logon credentials for various sites that you visit.

Warning:

If you select User Names And Passwords On Forms, Internet Explorer always prompts you before collecting a new password. The password itself appears on screen as a string of asterisks and is encrypted for storage on your disk. A person reading over your shoulder or prowling your hard disk will therefore not be able to pick up your password when AutoComplete supplies it. However, anyone who has physical access to your computer when you are logged on to your user account could interact with websites for which you have AutoComplete user name and password data, effectively impersonating you. Unless you are sure that no one else will ever use your account, you might want to decline the browser's offer to remember logon credentials.

If you want Internet Explorer to remember logon credentials for new sites that you visit, be sure to select Ask Me Before Saving Passwords, as well as User Names And Passwords On Forms. If you clear this suboption, the AutoComplete feature will retain entries that it already has recorded but will not record new ones.