Configuring General Internet Explorer Settings in Windows 7

There are a number of different settings you can configure in Internet Explorer, including the home page, security settings, and history options. Today I'm just going to go through the settings on the General tab.

To access the Internet Explorer settings, you need to select the cog in the top left hand corner and select Internet Options

On the General tab of the Internet Options you can configure the home page, start up page, the appearance of tabs, browsing history and the general appearance of Internet Explorer.
To configure the home page, just type the web address of the page you want as your home in the text box at the top. If you would like to have multiple home page tabs you need to type each web address on a new line.

To configure tabs, you need to click on the tabs button on the general screen. You can then select how you want tabs to behave.

To configure browsing history settings from the general tab you need to click on the settings button underneath the browsing history header.

There are 3 tabs on the browsing history settings page - temporary internet files, history and caches and databases. When you browse using Internet Explorer, files downloaded from the webpage, such as any HTML or Javascript, gets saved into the Tempory Internet Files folder, and when you visit a page again, only changes are downloaded. These files are handy because it means any cached pages are available offline. However they are also viewed as a security risk because anyone who has access to your computer also has access to your cache. On this tab you can choose when you want to check for any new versions of stored web pages, view the files and objects within the folder and move the folder.

On the history page you can choose how long you want Internet Explorer to keep your browsing history, for example you can select for Internet Explorer to delete your browsing history every 7 days.

On the caches and databases tab, you can choose whether or not to allow website caches and databases, and set a limit for caches and database, for example if a website cache or database exceeds 10MB you can choose to delete it or exceed the limit. 




On the general tab you can also select to delete browing history every time you exit Internet Explorer.

You can also change the colour of your browser window, the language and font used and accessibility (make the information easy to see).