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You probably go online every day, but are you getting the most from your surfing experience? Little-known shortcuts and handy workarounds abound in both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

Your browser is your window on to the world wide web, and knowing its features and foibles is essential. Want to know how to change your home page, delete your internet history or play video directly from your browser? Our tips will help streamline your surfing for a faster, and more customised, experience.

Increase fonts on the fly.
If the text on a website is too small for you to read comfortably, don't lean forward and squint - it won't do your eyesight any good and isn't great for your posture, either. IE and Netscape Navigator let you change the font size of any web page to suit you. Internet Explorer Press Ctrl on your keyboard while turning the mouse wheel. Depending on which direction the wheel is rolled, the text will increase or decrease in size. However, this trick does not work on all sites. If you don't have a wheel on your mouse, go to the View menu, select Text Size and choose the size you want. Netscape Although resizing the text cannot be done using the mouse wheel in Netscape, it is almost as simple and far more successful. Just go to the View menu, select Text Size, then choose the percentage you want to increase or decrease the font size by.
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Jumping Multiple Pages
The Back and Forward buttons on your browser can also be used for jumping multiple pages in both Internet Explorer and Netscape. Click on the small arrow to the right of the Back and Forward buttons. A list of recently visited pages will appear. When the mouse pointer is moved over the list, specific pages are highlighted. It is possible to jump multiple pages by clicking on the links, once highlighted. An increasing number of websites use automatic page redirection and other tricks to try and stop visitors leaving their sites via the Back button. To escape from one of these sites, simply jump back more than two pages in one go.
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Lose the graphics
With slow connections, animations, photographs, audio files and videos can bring the surfing experience to a grinding halt. To help speed things up, just make your browser ignore all these bandwidth-hungry distractions. Internet Explorer Go to the Tools menu, choose Internet Options and click on the Advanced tab. Scroll down the list and in the Multimedia section uncheck the boxes next to play animations, sounds and videos and show pictures. Netscape Go to the Edit menu, choose Preferences. Then double-click on Privacy & Security. Click on Images and choose. Do not load any images. In addition, click on Advanced and uncheck Java and XSLT. Web pages will load more quickly, but you may lose some functionality.
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Change your home page
Whenever a browser is first started, it opens on its home page. Since you can set which site this is, you might as well make sure the first site you see in the morning is one you actually find useful or entertaining. The simplest way of changing the website that appears as the home page is to visit log on to it and then do one of the following: Internet Explorer Choose the Tools menu, Internet Options. Then click "Use current" or type in the address of your preferred home page. For Netscape: Choose the Edit menu, Preferences. Then click "Use current page" or type in the preferred address. If at any point you want to return to the home page set in your browser, just click on the home button - an icon with an image of a little house in the toolbar.
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Clear your history
In general, whenever you click the Back or Forward buttons, any images and files on the page are retrieved from your temporary internet files and history folders where they've been stored to quicken the process, rather than reload the whole page each time. Although this is meant to speed up your browsing experience, you should regularly clear the build-up of these files in the cache to 'free up' some space and allow your browser to function better. This is done by going to the Tools menu, click Internet Options, select the General tab where you'll find the buttons to clear your Browsing History, etc...
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Auto Image Resizing
Automatic image resizing is a new feature in IE that automatically changes the size of a picture to fit into your browser window. When a picture file is opened in the browser, the image is shrunk so it can be viewed in its entirety. When the mouse pointer is hovered over the picture, a small square icon appears in the bottom righthand corner of the picture. To make the image revert back to its original size, simply click on the icon. This feature is active by default but, if it annoys you then you can switch it off. To turn the Automatic image resizing feature off, go to the Tools menu, Internet Options, Advanced. Then scroll down the list and uncheck the box next to. Enable automatic image resizing.
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