IE 7 won’t win any awards for innovation, having not quite caught up with features its free competitor, the Mozilla Firefox browser, came out with two years ago.Besides the tabbed windows, IE 7 has (thankfully) copied several other features from Firefox, Opera, and other non-Microsoft browsers. These include the ability to add Internet search engines of your choice to IE’s search bar and a default Shink to Fit setting so Web pages will fit your printer’s paper size.
However, IE 7 has also gained a few new features that other browsers may themselves need to catch up with.
Pressing Ctrl+Q or clicking the Quick Tabs tab on the IE 7 toolbar tiles all of your open tabs into a convenient thumbnail view (see Fig). When you have a lot of tabs open, Quick Tabs can save you a substantial amount of time that you might otherwise spend clicking at random to get back to a particular site.
Page Zoom is another handy feature. When you’re viewing a web page that’s just too small or too large, hold down the Ctrl key and press + to make the page 10 percent larger, – to make it 10 percent smaller, or 0 (zero) to return the page to its original size.
These special keystroke sequences work exactly the same way as they do in Firefox, except that IE 7 scales both images and text. The keystrokes work whether you use the symbol keys on the main keyboard or the numeric keypad.
There’s also a small Page Zoom button on the extreme right of IE 7’s status bar. You can click it once to scale a Web page to 125 percent, click it again for 150 percent, and click it a third time to go back to 100 percent.
