The default setting for the Home Page on your JDS Web Browser is http://www.sun.com. If you want to set a different Home Page, select Edit → Preferences → Navigator, where, in the middle section labeled Home Page, you can enter a new URL on the Location line.

The example in Figure 6-44 illustrates resetting the Home Page to Google. Now, each time you launch web browser, Google is the first screen that opens up. (See Figure 6-45.) Google is an excellent first screen for many people, because when they launch a new browser, finding information is often the first thing to do. Other frequent choices people make for their first screen include their Web-mail service, such as Yahoo! Mail, their personal Web-log (blog), or their company extranet.

Figure 6-44. Resetting the Home Page

Figure 6-45. The new Home Page

Since the web browser gets heavy usage on most people’s desktops, it helps to place a Launcher icon on the desktop or on the Taskbar panel for one-click access to open the web browser.

When you are already in your web browser, a convenient way to launch another instance of the browser is with the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl-N. (This keyboard shortcut works in most applications, launching a new instance of the currently live application window.)

If you have built up a large collection of Favorites (also known as Bookmarks) in your previous desktop browser, or even a small but high-quality set, you may be more productive on your new JDS system if you can import them at the first opportunity.

The environment depicted in Figure 6-46 through Figure 6-48 is Windows XP with MS Outlook (2000) and Internet Explorer.

Figure 6-46. A plethora of Favorites

Importing Favorites (Bookmarks) varies, depending on the environment from which you are moving, but generally involves the following steps:

Step 1: exporting Favorites from Windows XP

First, open Internet Explorer and select File → Import and Export . . . to open the Welcome screen of the Import/Export Wizard, shown in Figure 6-47.

Figure 6-47. The Import/Export Wizard

Click the Next button, which takes you to the next screen. Then select Export Favorites in the “Choose an action to perform” pane. Click the Next button, which opens a window called Export Favorites Source Folder, shown in Figure 6-48.

Figure 6-48. Picking the source folder

Designate from which folder you want to export Favorites. It’s the “Favorites” folder at the top of the tree, as seen in Figure 6-48. Highlight the Favorites folder with a single click, and then click the Next button.

Here, as illustrated in Figure 6-49, tell the wizard the path and filename of the file you want to create to hold your exported Favorites data. Figure 6-49 uses the default path C:Documents and SettingsUserMy Documents and the default filename bookmark.htm. These should work fine for most users, but you can also designate your own path or a different filename. In either case, you need to remember the filename and its path (i.e., where it’s located in your filesystem) to complete importing Favorites to JDS. Watch out if you already have a file named bookmarks.htm at this location: it will be overwritten.

Figure 6-49. Export to a file

Click Next, then the Finish button.

If you used the default filename and path and all goes well, your favorites will have been successfully exported to a file named bookmark.htm, located in the C:Documents and SettingsUserMy Documents directory. Keep this in mind for Step 2.

Now you’ll get a small window saying that you “Successfully exported favorites.”

Step 3: import your Favorites into the JDS Web Browser

Leave your Windows XP environment and move over to JDS.

Open JDS Email and Calendar and click the Send/Receive button on the toolbar to receive your email. Reasonably soon, you can find your Favorites file attached to an email in your Inbox.

Open the email by double-clicking on it in your Inbox. Figure 6-50 shows an open email message. Then scroll down to the bottom of the email, where you’ll find the attachment, and click on the caret. On the drop-down menu, click Save Attachment, and the Save Attachment window pops up. Here, as shown in Figure 6-51, you can choose the target directory where you want to place the file, by browsing through the Folders pane. You can also change the filename in this window if you want, or create a new folder with the eponymous button.

Figure 6-50. Saving an attachment

Figure 6-51. The Save Attachment window

Now, to import your Favorites into your web browser, open your JDS Web Browser and click Ctrl-B. Alternatively, click on Bookmarks in the browser’s Main menu. This produces a drop-down list where you should click “Manage Bookmarks . . . " Either the keyboard shortcut or the menu option opens the Bookmark Manager window.

Here, in the Bookmark Manager window, selecting Tools → Import opens the “Import bookmark file” window. Here, you can search for and select the file you just emailed to yourself. (Figure 6-52) The Bookmark Manager window is covered more extensively below in the Section 6.3.3.

In this example, we saved the bookmark.htm file from our email to the path /home/swhiser/Documents/JDS_manual, where it sits unperturbed. Click on folders until the correct path appears in the “Look in:” drop-down menu, at the top. When you are in the correct folder, the file you are looking for should be visible in the main pane, as shown in Figure 6-52. Click once on the filename; it becomes highlighted and appears in the “File name:” field. Finally, click the Open button to import your bookmark folders and bookmarks.

Figure 6-52. The Import bookmark file: window

If you already had a number of bookmarks and folders set up in your JDS Web Browser, they should still be there. But you may need to do some pruning, rearranging, or refiling in the list. Each additional import you perform appends the contents of a bookmarks or Favorites file to the end of the existing bookmarks list in your web browser.

The web browser has a full toolset for surfing and searching the Web. The basic tool elements are located in familiar places and provide functionality that users from other popular desktop environments make no effort to pick up quickly. (See Figure 6-53.)

Figure 6-53. Basic elements of JDS web browser

One prominent basic feature of the web browser is the Location bar, the white field that sits prominently at the center of the browser’s Navigation toolbar, just below the Menu bar, at the top. You can enter a URL there by manually typing in the name of the web site you wish to visit. Often, you can just type the core name or keyword of the company or site. For example, you can get to Apple Computer’s web site by fully typing http:///www.apple.com. But for a popular site like this one, try just typing apple; the browser’s native intelligence, in combination with the Google search engine, should find the right site. (See Figure 6-54.)

Figure 6-54. Entering the URL at the Location bar

Be aware that sometimes www does not belong in certain URL sequences. Always check the precise punctuation of a URL and make sure that uppercase and lowercase appear as they are supposed to, because some URLs require exact input.

Hyperlinks are the elements of text within a web page on which you can click to go elsewhere; they are usually highlighted in blue and underlined. (Figure 6-55) If they are objects or graphics in a web page, they are often not highlighted, but you can still click on them. In either case, when they are clicked, they take you to another web page. Hyperlinks are also commonly referred to as “links.”

Figure 6-55. Hyperlinks in an exemplary Home Page

If you want to return later to this web site in Figure 6-55, the best way to store its URL in your web browser is by using the handy Bookmarks feature. Press Ctrl-D or click Bookmarks on the browser’s Main menu and select Bookmark This Page from the top of the drop-down list. This automatically places the URL of the current web page at the very bottom of your Bookmarks List.

See the sections, Section 6.3.3.2 and Section 6.3.3.4 for more advanced ways of using Bookmarks.

If there is a keyboard shortcut to win the Academy Award of Desktop Keyboard Shortcuts, it is web browser’s Ctrl-L. In the JDS Web Browser, this places the cursor in the browser’s Location bar. When there is a URL already in the Location bar—which is most of the time—this shortcut also highlights the whole URL, so you can immediately type in a new keyword or the URL of the web page you wish to visit, and the previous URL is automatically replaced.

Advanced users come to rely heavily upon a large list of Bookmarks, just as many rely upon an extensive and well-ordered file cabinet in a business or home office. The larger the Bookmark list, the more helpful is an intelligent filing scheme that simplifies and speeds a search for that all-important web site or article.

We’ve already shown how to import your Bookmarks from your old desktop environment in the section, Section 6.3.1.3 here we go deeper into the ways you can manage Bookmarks.

The Bookmark Manager window is where you can create and organize Bookmark folders and create a sort of filing cabinet for all the web information that’s important to you.

To open the Bookmark Manager window, illustrated in Figure 6-56 and Figure 6-57, select Bookmarks → Manage Bookmarks . . . from your browser’s Main menu.

Figure 6-56. Bookmark Manager window, out of the box

Figure 6-57. Bookmark Manager, after a few years of use

Just like folders on your desktop, folders within your Bookmarks can be organized into a convenient tree structure. This is increasingly useful as the number of Bookmarks builds up.

To create a new Bookmark folder, select the Bookmarks drop-down off the Main menu and click on “Manage Bookmarks...” that calls up the Bookmark Manager window. (See Figure 6-56 and Figure 6-57.) First, highlight, with a single mouse click, the folder immediately below where you want the new folder to be placed. Then, click the New Folder button, located at the far left on the Bookmark Manager toolbar. This action brings up a window called Properties for “New Folder,” where you can enter the name and a description of the new folder. Finish by clicking the OK button.

Filing a Bookmark is one step more sophisticated than just adding a Bookmark (See the section, Section 6.3.2.4). It’s what you do when you have already added Bookmark Folders to establish a filing system for your Bookmarks.

To File a Bookmark, simply select the Bookmarks drop-down from the browser’s Main menu and click on “File Bookmark . . . " that calls up the File Bookmark window, where you can highlight a specific destination folder, with a single mouse click, and then press the OK button. Note how, in Figure 6-58, when the File Bookmark window appears, the name and URL of the current web page are automatically entered in the Name and Location fields.

Figure 6-58. Filing a Bookmark

In the File Bookmark window, you can also alter the name of the web site (as it appears in your Bookmarks list) and enter a Custom Keyword that permits faster access to the web page that you are filing. (This is a terrific feature, covered in more detail in Custom Keywords.)

The JDS Web Browser’s Personal Toolbar is located just below the Location bar. (See Figure 6-53.) Out of the box, the Personal toolbar has only a Home icon, a Bookmarks icon (which works identically to pulling down the Bookmarks drop-down from the Main menu), and a Sun Microsystems folder icon. But you can add more folders and individual web site links to this toolbar to make your web browser really sing in your key. (See Figure 6-59.) The example in Figure 6-54 shows the folders we have added already to our Personal Toolbar, “JDS Manual” and “OSS News Blogs.” We have taken away the Sun Microsystems folder icon.

Figure 6-59. Among our most frequented web sites . . .

To add the current web site to the Personal Toolbar, select Bookmarks → File Bookmarks . . . on the browser’s Main menu (just as in the section, Section 6.3.3.4. Having called up the File Bookmark window, now click once on the Personal Toolbar Folder in the Destination: pane. (See Figure 6-60.) This highlights the Personal Toolbar Folder, and now you can press the OK button.

Figure 6-60. Filing a link in the Personal Toolbar Folder

In Figure 6-60, notice that while the web site name and location were automatically entered in their respective fields, we took pains to give our new Personal Toolbar item a keyword. (See Figure 6-61.) See the section, Section 6.3.3.6 for additional information about assigning keywords to your Bookmark entries.

Figure 6-61. Slashdot is filed in the Personal Toolbar Folder

In addition to adding a single link or web site to the Personal Toolbar, you can add an entire folder that works as a drop-down menu full of bookmarks. This allows you to pack more links into the limited real estate up there on the Personal Toolbar.

Adding a folder to the Personal Toolbar is just as easy as adding a link. In the web browser, select Bookmarks → File Bookmarks . . . from the Main menu. In the File Bookmarks window, highlight the Bookmarks Folder with a single click, then click the New Folder button at the bottom right of the File Bookmarks window. This opens a Properties for “New Folder” window. Next, simply type the name of your new folder into the “Name:” field (the description is optional) and click the OK button.

Using File Bookmark window is the fastest way to add a new folder to the Personal Toolbar. But you can also add or otherwise manage Bookmark links and folders by calling up the Bookmark Manager window via Bookmarks → Manage Bookmarks . . . of the Main menu.

Figure 6-62. Dropping a new folder into place

This is a superb feature. The JDS Web Browser permits you to set your own keywords to rapidly launch important or favorite web pages. In the earlier example, Figure 6-60, we set up a quick two-keystroke keyword for the Slashdot Home Page. You can create custom keywords for any web page you wish. Once you make using custom keywords a habit, your web browsing will positively smoke!

You can set a custom keyword when you file a Bookmark. Call up the File Bookmark window by selecting the Bookmarks drop-down on the browser’s Main menu and by clicking “File Bookmark . . . “. In the File Bookmark window, you’ll see the highlighted web page’s name and location. Now enter a keyword in the Keyword field and click OK.

Alternatively, you can set custom keywords for web pages that are already filed in your Bookmarks list by going into Bookmark Manager, where you can highlight a particular Bookmarked web page and click on the Properties button. This action calls up the Properties for “[Name of web page]” window, where you can type in the new keyword in the Keyword field and click OK.

There are four ways to enjoin a search with the web browser:

The most attractive benefit of the highlight and right-click method (the second on the list) is that the action is quick and calls up another instance of the web browser. This allows you to pursue the search in a different browser instance, without losing your place at the original page.

One quick way to go to Google is to simply click the Search button on the Location bar. This takes you to the Google Home Page, where you can enter a search in the main search field there. (See Figure 6-53.) The Search button is set by default to call up Google, but you can set the button to call up one of eight different search sites by selecting Edit → Preferences → Navigator → Internet Search. There, in the Default Search Engine section, you can select a different search engine.

The Sidebar (Figure 6-63 also offers similar search capabilities.

Figure 6-63. Searching for “Godot” from the Sidebar

Tabbed browsing enables you to open numerous web pages within a single instance of Web Browser, where you can move to a page by clicking its tab. (Figure 6-64)

Figure 6-64. Tabbed browsing

To open a new tab in Web Browser, press Ctrl-T. You can also open a web page link in a new tab by right-clicking on the link and then clicking “Open Link in New Tab” in the menu that appears.

In Figure 6-64, you can see some of our favorite open source news blogs across the Tab Bar. At the far left of the Tab Bar is a button that allows you to open a new tab, and at the far right is a button for closing the current tab.

Combining Tabbed Browsing with Search and active use of the Sidebar offers a powerful toolkit of facilities for your web research repertoire.

JDS’s Web Browser has a setting to prevent unwanted pop ups (and “pop unders,” too) from disturbing your pristine work flow. Pop ups are among the most annoying web developments to pop up in recent years, so it’s great to have control of these exploitative, attention-grabbing techniques.

To turn blocking on, go to Edit → Preferences → Privacy & Security → Popup Windows. There you can check the box “Block unrequested pop-up windows.” You can also elect to play a sound when a pop-up window is blocked or to display an icon in the Navigator status bar.

Note that some pop ups are desirable. Pop-up blocking can prevent some important features at certain web sites from working, such as login windows for banks and online shopping sites.

You can add exceptions to pop-up blocking, through the Popup Manager window. To call up Popup Manager, go from the web browser’s Main Menu to Tools → Popup Manager → Manage Popups. This opens the Allowed Web Sites window. Here, you can add specific web sites to a list of pop-up-blocking exceptions. You can remove sites from this list, too.

To set a new pop-up exception, as you come across a site you want to deal with, select Tools → Popup Manager → Allow Popups From This Site. This is a different route that opens the same Allowed Web Sites window but has the current web page’s information already entered in the Add field. Just click OK to add the site to the pop-up-blocking exceptions list.

JDS’s Web Browser offers extensive cookie management features through the Cookie Manager. We cover the basics of blocking, unblocking, and editing cookies here.

Cookies are small pieces of information that certain web sites store on your computer’s hard drive when you visit that web site. Cookies contain information about you or your computer, allowing the serving web site to identify you in certain ways when you return to that site. For example, some web sites require sign-on or even password access; it is the cookie information stored in your browser that permits you to avoid reentering this data each time you return to that web site. So cookies provide a measure of convenience to users that can also be commercially beneficial to owners of web sites.

Users and observers have different opinions about whether or how cookies may invade personal privacy. The choice to block cookies is up to the individual user: how much convenience are you are willing to trade away for possibly better privacy?

If you want to avoid receiving a cookie from a specific web site, go to the Home Page of that site and select Tools → Cookie Manager → Block Cookies from this Site. This calls up a window with the message, “Cookies from this site will always be rejected.” Press OK.

If you have blocked cookies from a web site and wish to unblock them, select Tools → Cookie Manager → Unblock Cookies from this Site. This likewise calls a window with the message, “Cookies from this site will not be blocked.” Press OK.

You can also open Cookie Manager (Figure 6-65 to view and remove all cookies that already may be stored in your computer. From the browser’s Main menu, select Tools → Cookie Manager → Manage Stored Cookies. In Cookie Manager, you can scroll through all the cookies on your computer. The left column, Site, is the one you want to check, because it identifies the web site from which the cookies came. The second column, Cookie Name, is usually indecipherable, but you can ignore it.

Figure 6-65. The Cookie Manager

Remove cookies individually using the Remove Cookie button, at the bottom of the window, or wipe them all out together using the Remove All Cookies button. You can also highlight a contiguous group of cookies for removal—for example, a number of cookies that all come from the same site—by highlighting one cookie, holding down the Shift key, and pressing the up or down arrow key to highlight the cookies you’d like to remove. Then press the Remove Cookie button.

Web Browser keeps track of the most recent web sites you’ve visited in two places: the Location bar (where you enter URLs) and in a History window. By default, all the sites you’ve visited for the past nine days are stored in your history. A much shorter list is in the Location bar.

To see the sites you’ve recently visited in the Location bar, click on the downward-pointing caret, at the right end, inside the Location bar. That produces a drop-down list of recently visited web sites. Scroll down the list and click on any URL to quickly return to that site.

A more comprehensive list of past URLs appears in the History window. (Figure 6-66) Call up this window by pressing Ctrl-H or selecting Go → History from the browser’s Main menu.

Figure 6-66. The History window

To clear your browsing histories, go to the browser’s Main menu and select Edit → Preferences . . . → Navigator → History. There, you can independently clear the history in the Location bar and the contents of the History window. You can also increase or decrease the number of days of history stored by Web Browser.

You can also delete individual web sites within your History window, without clearing all of them. Open the History window (Ctrl-H), right-click on the URL you want to remove, and select Delete.

You can’t turn off the Location bar’s history collection function; you can only clear it manually. However, you can turn off history collection in the History window. At the browser’s Main menu, select Edit → Preferences . . . → Navigator → History. In the Browsing History section, set the “Remember visited pages for the last ____ days” field to 0.

JDS’s Web Browser also offers a master password that protects sensitive information stored by the browser such as web site passwords and digital certificates. You were prompted to enter a master password when you (or your system administrator) first set up the system.

You can manage your master password from the Preferences window. Select Edit → Preferences . . . → Privacy & Security → Master Passwords, where you can change, reset or establish how often the system asks you to confirm your master password. (See Figure 6-67.)

Figure 6-67. Manage your master password

Security-conscious users can also manage web site passwords by deleting them or by blocking them from being saved from certain important web sites. This adds a beneficial layer of security for protecting access to personal financial information or sensitive personal data, such as credit card information or order history.

To manage your web passwords, go to the browser’s Main menu and select Tools → Password Manager → Manage Stored Passwords. This opens the Password Manager window (Figure 6-68, where you can remove sensitive web sites’ passwords individually or all together. You can also create a list of web sites for which the browser never saves the password. To create or manage the list of web sites for which you wish to block password storage, click over to the Passwords Never Saved tab (shown in the background of Figure 6-68).

Figure 6-68. View of the “Passwords Saved” tab

Many animations on the Web, and a growing number of forms and other advanced web features, are done in Macromedia Flash. JDS automatically supports Flash in the web browser so that JDS users can view and interact with these pages. The explosive growth of Flash’s features and popularity makes this an important component of the JDS browser. Flash is an illustration of how Sun has been willing to incorporate commercial, proprietary features into JDS to provide users with what they need, on top of an essentially open source software base.

In addition to supporting Flash transparently in the web browser, JDS also permits you to export Impress presentations in the Flash format for distribution or display on the Web. See Chapter 8 for details.