Installing and configuring a browser

Installing and configuring a browser

If you were to search the Web for "configuring a browser," and I did, you will find a long list of resources to help you configure a browser for everything from chat session tools, graphic tools, Telnet, and much more. Today's most popular browsers, Internet Explorer (www.microsoft.com), Netscape Navigator (http://home.netscape.com), and Opera (www.opera.com), are largely self-configuring.

However, there are some areas where the configuration of the browser can affect the PC on which it is loaded. Here are the ones you should know for the exam:

l Cached content: To speed up the time required to display a downloaded Web page, browsers store the page and its objects in a disk cache on the hard disk. Internet Explorer (IE) calls this Temporary Internet Files. When you ask to see the page again, it is supplied from the cache, which speeds up the display and reduces the amount of bandwidth required to support your PC.

By default the cache is emptied each time IE is started. However, you can change the caching settings so that the cache is never cleared, a page is never cached, or some setting in-between. One of the more important of the caching settings is the amount of the disk space you wish to assign to cache. If you have all the disk space in the world, then you can use more of the disk for caching, but if the PC is low on disk space, minimize the disk space used for Internet caching.

l History files: The History folder holds the addresses and links to sites you have visited on the Internet over a given time period. These links are displayed in the drop-down list of the Address line of the browser. Keeping a fewer number of days reduces the amount of disk space used for these links.

l Players and handlers: The latest releases of the most popular browsers include most of the players and handlers required for the majority of content on the Web. However, you may want to download customer players and handlers to display or playback the content on specific Web sites.

The popular players and handlers are Adobe Acrobat (used to read PDF [portable data format] files), Flash (used to play Macromedia Flash animations), and Windows Media Player, Apple QuickTime, and RealPlayer (all used to play back streaming audio, video, and multimedia).