Sometimes you come across a site that is difficult to view because the print is too small, or maybe there’s a photo on the site that you’d like to get a closer look. This is especially true if you happen to be viewing on a screen that is small like the netbook. Netbooks are great for portability and ease of carrying around, but sometimes the small screen is a hindrance.
If you look at the top of your screen, chances are excellent that you have several toolbars using up screen real estate. Looking at mine right now I can see 6 bars at the top; since I’m using a large monitor to type this, the bars only take up maybe 20% or less of the screen. When I use my netbook though, the bars take up closer to half the screen! To deal with this, tap the f11 key at the top of your keyboard and see what happens.
Well, what do you know – look how much extra screen real estate that gives you. All the toolbars disappeared; the taskbar at the bottom, and even the address bar, now how do you get them back?? Never fear, they aren’t gone forever and you can easily get them back just the same way you got rid of them. Just tap the f11 key again and you’re back to the way you were.
Now let’s say you really like all the extra elbow room, but don’t want to have to be toggling back and forth to navigate to another site – check this out: after you’ve done the f11 tap and have a full screen to look at, just move your mouse up to the top of the screen and your address bar will pop back into view so you can tell the browser where you want to go next.
Once you did this you also lost the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, so you can’t glance down there at the clock to see what time it is, and unfortunately, that one doesn’t show up if you hover the mouse over it. I just put this in the category of, “you can’t have everything”.
Along the same lines, if you’re having trouble viewing some particular item on a page, you can make the page temporarily larger or smaller – hold down the Ctrl key, and while holding down the key, turn the scroll button on your mouse and see what happens. If you by chance don’t have a scroll button, or that doesn’t work, try holding down the Crtl key and tapping the plus (+) key to make larger, or the minus (-) key to make smaller.
I was recently looking at a photo posted online and wanted to get a closer look, and used this to get a really close-in view. You don’t have to suffer with limitations in your viewing, and these tips should help.
The caveat for both these tips is, while they work just as I said in the Firefox browser, they may or may not work or may work only partially if you’re using Internet Explorer or some other browser. This might be a good time for me to put in another plug for using Firefox, my very favorite browser!
Give the tips a try and see if they help.
