March 01, 2002

Customising IE

While it may not be the world's best browser, like many people I use IE6 every day. Today I took some time to improve its toolbars a little. Most MS apps are over-encrusted with useless icons, while hiding some very useful ones. With a bit of effort their toolbars can become quite functional.

Firstly, I finally installed the Google toolbar. I resisted doing this for a long time as I didn't want to lose a whole line of screen real estate, so I kept the Google bookmarklet in the Links bar instead. But there's no denying the usefulness of the toolbar, and today I realised I could squeeze it in on the first line if I drop some unneeded icons and captions.

Icons to go included Print, Search, and Favourites, the latter two being trumped by Google and Powermarks respectively. I added the Text Size button, as I use this more frequently these days and the shortcut on the mousewheel is somewhat lacking in feedback. The last button, by the way, is "Edit in Textpad" -- indispensable, if you haven't tied that button to a decent text editor yet. (Assuming you're a web designer.) The Media button is new to IE6, I figured I'll keep it around for a bit and see if I use it.

So here's what I ended up with, at an 800x600 window size:

Note that after you've spent some time finetuning the positioning of the various toolbars, lock them in place so you don't accidentally move them later. This option is under the View menu, but appears to be IE6 only.

The Links bar is an ideal place for frequently-used bookmarklets.

I'm still undecided about the utility of the Google "advanced features", but I'm trialling them for now. Unfortunately there's no option yet to add the Google Compute button; I assume that's for invitation-only beta-testers.

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