More Web Basics—Searching, Saving, and More
More Web Basics—Searching, Saving, and More
In This Chapter
Running multiple Web sessions
Opening files from your hard disk
All about the cache and reloading
Searching documents and using the pop-up menu
Copying things you find to the Clipboard
Saving images, documents, and files
You've seen the basic moves; now you are ready to learn more techniques to help you find your way around the Web. In the last chapter, you learned how to move around on the Web using a Web browser such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer. In this chapter, you'll find out how to run multiple Web sessions at the same time, how to deal with the cache, how to save what you find, and so on. You need to know these advanced moves to work efficiently on the Web.
Multiple Windows: Ambidextrous Browsing
These days, most browsers enable you to run more than one Web session at the same time. Why would you want to do that? There could be many reasons. While you wait for an image to load in one window, you can read something in another window. Or maybe you need to find information at another Web site but don't want to lose your place at the current one. (Yes, you have bookmarks and the history list, but sometimes it's just easier to open another window.) You can open one or more new browser windows, as shown in Figure 3.1, so that you can run multiple Web sessions. In this example, you can see two Internet Explorer windows. To make the one at the back take up the entire screen, press F11 to use the Fullscreen feature (earlier versions had a Fullscreen button), and then right-click the bar and select the Autohide feature (see Chapter 2, "Working on the World Wide Web").
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Figure 3.1 Opening multiple windows is a good way to keep from getting lost or to do more than one thing at a time. In this illustration, one Internet Explorer sits over another that has been maximized using the Fullscreen command (press F11).
Exactly how you open a new window varies among browsers; however, most are similar. In Netscape Navigator, try these procedures:
Right-click the link that you want to follow in a new window, and then choose Open in New Window. A new Netscape window opens, and the referenced document opens in that window.
Choose File, New Web Browser, or File, New, Navigator Window, or press Ctrl+N to open a new window displaying the home page.
Internet Explorer gives you several options:
Right-click the link you want to follow, and then choose Open in New Window. A new window opens, displaying the referenced document.
Press Tab until the link becomes highlighted, and then press Shift+Enter.
Choose File, New Window (or, in some versions, File, New, Window) or press Ctrl+N to open a new window that displays the same document as the one you've just viewed.
You might encounter some problems when running multiple Web sessions. Web browsers are turning into real memory hogs, so you may find that you don't have enough memory to run multiple sessions or to run more than one additional session. In addition, your modem can do only so much work. If you have several Web windows open and each is transferring things at the same time, every transfer will be slower than if it were the only thing the modem had to do.
Automatic Multiple Sessions
Now and then, windows will open automatically. If you suddenly notice that the browser's Back button is disabled, it might be that when you clicked a link, a secondary window opened and you didn't notice. Web authors can create codes in their Web pages that force browsers to open secondary or targeted windows.