There are lots of ways to browse the web anonymously. Internet Explorer 8 lets you do this for free.  Click “safety” in the upper right of the Explorer 8 screen and you will see the “InPrivate” label. This means your own computer won’t record sites you visit or what you do there. If you choose “InPrivate Filter” from the drop-down menu, websites won’t save records of your visits on their servers. You can do the same thing in Firefox with any of several free add-ons you can find ataddons.mozilla.org. “Better Privacy” has nearly three million downloads.

If you need more, there’s “Anti Tracks,” a $35 program from giantmatrix.com.  It gives you tools to shred specific files, eliminate duplicates, lock certain folders, wipe a hard disk clean, hide files in pictures or audio files, etc.

There are too many Opera features to go into here, but one of the neatest is Opera Unite.� This lets you share files, photos, music and videos without having to attach them in an email. You can even chat with people who are looking at your postings. You get a special link, and it can be password protected. This is great not just for your friends and colleagues but for yourself if you’re on the road and need to get at something you left behind. You must leave Opera Unite running for this to work.

When you install Opera, you get a panel on the left-hand side of the browser window with a series of icons. Some are pre-installed and there are hundreds more you can add. Clicking on Notes� opens up a note-taking area. �Click on �the fridge for reminders. There are icons for contacts,bookmarks,� and history,� showing where you’ve been on the web recently.

You can get the new Opera 10.5 as well as Opera Mini,� a super-fast browser for your cell phone, at opera.com. (A final note here: Sometimes a web site will appear slightly differently in different browsers. This is especially �true on cell phones. �That’s why it’s good to have more than one.)

The new Opera version 10.5  is lightning fast with fun features.

As we’ve said before, when it comes to web browsers, the more the merrier. We’ve tried them all: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome and each has different strengths.

There are too many new Opera features to go into here,but one of the neatest things about Opera is “Opera Unite,” a way of sharing photos, music and videos on your computer without having to attach them in an email. You get a special link to share, which can be password protected.

When you install Opera, you get a left-hand panel on the side of the browser window with a series of icons. Some are pre-installed and there are  hundreds more you can add. Clicking on “Notes” opens up a note-taking area.  Click on  ”the fridge” for your reminders. There’s also an icon for “contacts,” “bookmarks,” and “history,” showing  where you’ve been on the web recently.

You can get Opera 10.5 from Opera.com. You can learn more about Opera Unite at unite.opera.com.

This is a landmark. It was just a couple of years ago that Internet Explorer dominated the world of browsing the Internet; it was used by more than 90 percent of people who went online. Of course that was mainly because it came packaged with Windows, so anyone who bought a computer automatically had it. But you can have as many Internet browsers as you want on your computer and gradually people began to move toward something better. Even Joy’s sister, who is totally baffled by computers, now uses Firefox for email and web browsing. So it’s still true, that if you make a better product, you will usually win out.

Many scripts are harmless, however. So if you’re on a site you trust and you get a warning from “NoScript,” you can temporarily allow the script or add that site to a list of trusted locations.

Another good add-on is PhishTankSiteChecker, which prevents Firefox users from being swept off to a malware site that looks like the one they thought they were going to. Instead it’s a phishing site, so naturally it’s called a “phish tank.”

There are hundreds of these add-ons and you can see all of them at addons.mozilla.org.  Bob likes Scrapbook, Screengrab and Cool Previews, which lets you view a web site before actually going there. Almost all these add-ons are free; a few ask for a small contribution to the author. As we’ve mentioned here before, you can have as many browsers as you want in Windows.

If you have the latest version of Firefox, you’ll see icons for all of your add-ons in a mini taskbar at the bottom or top of your Firefox screen. If you didn’t see your add-ons, go the “View” menu at the top of the screen and check “status bar.” To get the latest version, go to “Help” at the top of the Firefox display screen and choose “check for updates.”

If you’re like Bob, there are several ways to clock them.  If you use the Mozilla “Firefox” browser (Mozilla.com), you can download their free Ad Blocker and this works quite well. We found that a few ads get through the filter, but only a very few. No animated ads got through.  Remember: you can have as many web browsers as you like on your computer; they don’t interfere with each other.

If you’re using the new Internet Explorer 8, the “InPrivate” feature works like an ad blocker.  You can enable it by holding down the “CNTRL” and “Shift” keys and tapping the “F” key.  Another way to remove all advertising from a site is a favorite of Bob’s. If you pull down the “File” menu at the top of the Windows screen, one of your choices is “print preview.” If you select that, only the text and graphics within the article appear, all ads are wiped out.

Another way to do it is to use the mouse to select just the part of a web page that you want. Do control-c to save it to the clipboard, then paste it into Word or any other word processor.

Users get links on a toolbar at the top of the screen to make it easier to find their favorite news, social networks, blogs, banking, music, email and other websites. Click on “video” to see links to Hulu, YouTube, Bing Video and others. Click on “music” to get Pandora, Slacker, iTunes and Podcast Bunker. The “news” category has links to the BBC, Economist magazine, and other major sites.

Go to samfindbookmarksbar.com to get the Firefox add-in. If you don’t use Firefox, you can just visit samfind.com to find the most popular websites in each category.

Yahoo Search Pad

The search engine Yahoo.com has added a useful “Search Pad” feature that lets you takes notes as you search the web and automatically saves the sites you visited. It detects when you’ve done several searches on the same subject and links those sites together along with thumbnail pictures of their screens. When we tried this feature it turned out to be much handier than we expected. It’s easy to lose sight of the Search Pad but you can get it back by doing another search at Yahoo.com or by using the Yahoo! Toolbar. Click on the pencil icon in the Search Pad to save, open or start new searches.

At a recent West Coast computer security conference in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, hackers were invited to break into any web browser. The most popular choice was Apple’s “Safari,” though many hackers disdained breaking into it because it was just too easy. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox also had bugs hackers could exploit.

 But Google’s new Chrome browser turned out to be in another league. According to CNET news, which covered the conference extensively, none of the hackers at the conference even tried to break into Chrome, because it was just too difficult. 

First of all, let’s clear up some distinctions:

1.) A web browser is not the same as a search engine. A browser, such as Internet Explorer, connects you to the web; a search engine (like Google), looks for what you want.

2.) You can have more than one web browser on your computer. In fact, you can have as many as you want. We have four; each tends to be better at some particular thing. We also use more than one search engine. They do not interfere with each other.

3.) Contrary to criticisms we have read, we found the Chrome browser to be extremely fast. The new Internet Explorer 8, still in beta, claims to be faster.
Nice new features in Chrome:

1.) The search field that appears is also the address field. In other words, you can type a web site address if you know it or just type in a search term.

2.) When you open the new Chrome browser it shows a group of pictures of the sites you visit most often. Click on any of those and you go back there.

3.) The browser keeps a list of all the sites you’ve visited and when you went there.

4.) You can search that list by key words. The key word does not have to be in the site name. For example, searching on “apple” brought up a recipe for apple pie from Epicurious.com, a site we had previously visited.

5.) Chrome has an “incognito” feature, useful if you don’t want pages you visit to show up in your web history.

You can get Chrome from Google.com/chrome.