Everyone can surf the web: its amazing simplicity is part of its appeal.

But it is better to surf with the browser set up to work the way you like it. This is done using the View and Favorites menus in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.

IE5 is the browser most people use, and it is available for Windows PCs and Apple Macintoshes. However, other browsers, such as Opera and Netscape, offer similar facilities.

Most browsing is done using five standard buttons, the Address Bar, and the pull-down list of favourites or bookmarks.

The standard buttons are, naturally enough, on IE5's Standard Buttons toolbar (View|Toolbars|Standard Buttons). The address box, where you can type or paste in internet addresses, is on the Address Bar. There is also a Links bar, for links, and a Radio bar, which has a volume slider.

You can arrange these toolbars however you like. Each has a "handle" (two vertical lines on the far left): use the mouse to grab the handle, and hold down the left mouse button while you move the bar into position.

You probably will not want to customise these toolbars by, for example, adding or removing icons. However, you may want to remove the text labels under the icons, because this means they take up less room, and more icons can be shown at once.

Select View|Toolbars| Customize: two drop-down menus (bottom left) let you choose whether or not to have labels, and either large or small icons.

The first five icons are the most heavily used, so it may also be worth learning their keyboard shortcuts. The icons (and shortcuts) are: Back (Alt+left arrow key), Forward (Alt+right arrow), Stop button (Esc), Refresh (F5 and Control-F5), and Home (Alt+Home key).

The other shortcut well worth knowing is Control-N, which opens a new window.

Bookmarks

The Favorites menu provides a useful way of keeping a link to sites you want to revisit. These are sometimes called bookmarks -Netscape's name for them. However, this menu can easily become a mess, and the software IE5 provides to organise it (Favorites| Organise Favorites) is extremely cumbersome.

Fortunately, there is an easier way. Open Windows Explorer, and go to the C:\Windows\Favorites directory where the links are stored. Now you can use the usual Windows Explorer commands to organise your bookmarks. Create some extra subdirectories (File|New|Folder) and give them useful names, such as Finance or Games. Then use the mouse to move bookmarks into the appropriate subdirectories and sub-subdirectories.

No folder should have more than about 15 entries. If there is a link you no longer want, highlight it and press the delete key.

In Favorites, new links are always added to the bottom of the list. When you go back to Internet Explorer, sort them into alphabetical order. To do this, go to the section you want, right-click somewhere inside the pane, and select Sort by Name from the drop-down list.

The Favorites folder has a directory called Links. This is the place to put your four or five most visited sites such as Google, The Guardian, Hotsheet, Visto, or whatever. The entries in this directory will appear on the Links toolbar. Make sure the names are short or you will not get many in. (You can rename links in Windows Explorer by pressing the F2 key.) If the links do not appear in your preferred order, select a link, hold down the left mouse button, and move it to the position you want.

You can also keep favourites as icons on the Windows desktop. To do this, go to the website, click IE's File menu, select Send, then choose Shortcut to Desktop. When you double-click the resulting icon, the browser will go to that page.

Desktop space is usually too valuable to waste on bookmarks. However, it can be a handy place to store links temporarily. You can always delete them by moving the shortcut icons to the Recycle Bin.

More icons

Internet Explorer has more bars on the View menu - including three standard Explorer bars - and at least three more icons on the Standard Button Bar. The three standard Explorer bars are Search, Favorites and History, and each also has an icon. Clicking the globe-with-magnifier icon (Search) has the same effect as selecting View|Explorer Bar|Search or pressing Control-E. The starred folder icon calls up the Favorites panel, while the sundial summons the History panel.

Unlike toolbars, Explorer bars pop up in a panel on the left hand side of the browser.

After use, each panel can be closed in the usual way, by clicking the cross in the top right hand corner.

Having seen the way Favorites works, you should not be surprised to find History works in the same way. Each time you visit a site, its address is stored in a Windows subdirectory at C:\Windows\History.

If you want to clear out some, but not all of your History file, you can use Windows Explorer to select and delete folders or entries in this directory.