Last week we talked about Firefox and why (I believe) it is the best general web browser available and got it downloaded and installed for you (hopefully). Today we will talk through some of the menus in the menu bar.

If you have everything installed and nothing else going on, your screen should look something like the image above with normal web browser menu names displayed. Let’s walk through them and I will explain some of the items that might require it.

File
New Tab – Like we talked about last week, one of the advantages of Firefox is its tabbed browsing capabilities. Where you would have opened a new window before now you should open a new tab. You can do that by going to File -> New Tab or hitting Ctrl+T.

Open Location – All this does is take your cursor to the location bar at the top of the page where you type in the webpage you want to go to.

Close Tab – It closes one tab at a time, rather than closing down the whole of the Firefox browser.

Import – This is for importing bookmarks that you might have from another browser or saved as a document.

Edit
About the same as the Edit menu in just about every program.
Note: In non-Windows versions of Firefox this also contains the Options menu which is covered in the next post in the Beginning with Firefox series.

Find in This Page… – When you have a lot of text in the page you are viewing and you want to find something specific.

Find Again – Looks for the next instance of the search you just executed.

View
This is the first one with real power to change your ongoing browsing experience.

Toolbars – Toolbars are the “bars” at the top of your browser that add functionality to it. The menus that we’re looking at now are a toolbar, below that is the navigation toolbar and your bookmarks toolbar. In this sub-menu you can turn on or off toolbars that you have installed and you can customize them as well. If you click customize you’ll see a window that looks something like the image to the left.

Here you’ll be able to add buttons to your toolbars that are available in the menus or you can rearrange items. For now all I’d suggest you do is click the “Use Small Icons” box (unless you have bad vision). My favorite “hack” using this box is that you are able to drag the Location Box and the Search Box up onto the Menu Bar and give yourself that much more screenspace by disabling the Navigation Toolbar (I’ll write about this later.)

Sidebar – Like your toolbars, but here you can look at all of your bookmarks or browse the pages you’ve recently visited; and it’s on the side.

Status Bar – This is the bar at the bottom of your screen which gives you relatively vital information such as the location of the link that your mouse is over. Plug-ins that we’ll add to Firefox in the future will also display info here. Keep it checked.

Text Size – If you have bad vision, this will be your aid on pages that have small text. The newest version of Firefox that should be out by May 1 will actually enable you to enlarge the whole page to view it better!

Everything else in the View bar should probably be left alone if you don’t already know what it is. The only other thing that might be useful is the Fullscreen option which hides all the toolbars except for your tabs and makes the most use of your screen size.

History This one is pretty self explanatory, you can look through your browsing history here too.

Bookmarks Everything here is pretty self explanatory as well (if you ignore the thing about Add-ons which we’ll talk about in a later post), there are just a few things that I want to note.

Bookmark All Tabs… – You know how to bookmark one page a time, this will allow you to bookmark everything that you have open right now. Say you have been researching a school and have a bunch of tabs open about Podunk State University click this and save them all as links in a folder in your bookmarks.

Subscribe to This Page – We talked about Feeds/RSS a little bit last time. This is the simplest way to subscribe to a page (remember to look for the RSS Feed Icon – read more about it in the Wikipedia article on RSS), if you click on it now it will allow you to bookmark the future updates for CruTech. (If you decide to do this choose the options of LiveBookmarks and place it in your Bookmarks Toolbar.)

Bookmarks Toolbar – This is the toolbar at the top of your browser that should contain bookmarks that you use virtually every day or feeds that you want to keep up with. Right now you probably just have the “Getting Started” and “Latest Headlines”.

Tools – Let’s hold of on this one, there is as much there as this whole post. Next week.

Help – This is your best friend on any new program. Whenever you’re trying to figure out how to do something in a program that you’re not familiar with use this menu (or just hit F1) to bring up the help box… it’s very helpful.

For Internet Explorer Users – If this is you, check this one out, it’s a few articles in the Help box that may help you adjust to the changes that Firefox will bring.

That is all for this week. Take some time and explore some pages in the Help box to learn more about FF. Next time we’ll explore the Tools menu and the Options box.