by Bonnie Boots

Almost anything that can be done on a computer can be done in several different ways. This can be both gratifying and frustrating.  Frustrating when you ask a simple “How can I” question and get a hundred different answers in response. Gratifying when you discover that something you’ve found confusing or time consuming can be done in a faster, simpler way.

 I saw a perfect example of this recently while working with a client. She wanted to show me a website she visits frequently but couldn’t remember the web address. She said “I’ll have to Google it,” and opened a browser. But when she couldn’t remember the exact name of the site, even Google couldn’t help her.

 “Wait a minute,” I said. “If you visit the site often, it’s in your browser history. Just pull down the menu from the URL bar.”

 Her response was a big, puzzled “Huh?”

 I’ve come across this before. Many people don’t know that any browser offers you the ability to find a recently-visited web site by using the history. This tutorial will show you how, using FireFox as an example. The process is nearly the same in Internet Explorer.

(If you’re not already using FireFox as your browser, I’d encourage you to consider it. It’s free, easy to download and install and vastly superior to Internet Explorer in many ways, particularly in terms of internet security.  You can download FireFox  for free here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/  )               

In the picture below, you see what the Mozilla browser FireFox looks like when you open it.  The green arrow is pointing to the URL bar in FireFox. The URL bar looks and works in a similar manner in most browsers.

Here, the green arrow is pointing to the small black arrow at the end of the URL bar. Clicking on this small black arrow opens up a drop-down menu.

Here you see the drop-down menu. It has a slide bar just like a web page.

The drop-down menu shows a history of the URL’s, or web addresses, of the sites you’ve visited recently. The slide bar lets you scroll down to see the entire history.  As you can see in this picture, the last web site I viewed was iStock.com

If I point my cursor at iStock in the history and click my mouse, iStock will be highlighted….

And my browser will direct itself back to iStock.

I like having sites like iStock and eBay stay available in my history. It makes it fast and easy for me to travel to these old friends. What I don’t like is when my history gets cluttered up with sites I’ve been to once and will never visit again. When I find my drop-down history menu overflowing with sites I no longer want to remember, it’s easy to clean them out.

This illustration shows the arrow pointing to a site address in my URL history that I’m not likely to visit again anytime soon. It’s the site for the Florida State department of motor vehicles.

 You can see it’s located between www.writesideout.com,  my award-winning web site for writers, and www.yourhead.com, a Mac software site.

Because I’m not likely to visit this site again for quite a while, I want to clean it out of my history.

 I set the cursor on this unwanted URL, click to highlight it and IMMEDIATELY hit the “DELETE” key on my keyboard.

And here you can see state.fl.gov is all gone,

Browsers will eventually discard sites that aren’t frequently visited, but this can take a long time. Cleaning out unwanted sites keeps the history menu small, and choosing from a small menu of frequently visited sites is the fastest, easiest way to travel!

 About the Author

Bonnie Boots is the publisher/editor of The Internet Wizards Magazine for people who want to create their own products and market on the internet. Register for your free 1-year subscription at http://www.theinternetwizards.com