List buttons: Channels

The Channels button opens a pane on the left of the browser, which shows some of the available channels. (IE4 only)

A channel is a web site that is designed to provide you with regular updates of changing information.

If you subscribe to a channel, the new information will be automatically downloaded to your computer for you to view later. You can choose instead to get a message that the site has changed. Unlike a magazine subscription, this kind of subscribing does not cost you money.

Subscribing works best when you have a permanent connection to the Internet. If you have a slow connection to the Internet, you will probably not want to subscribe to any channels. This feature has not been as popular as expected because of the connection speed problem and has been dropped from IE5.

Confusing term - In IE you can also subscribe to a web page that is not a channel. When you add the page to Favorites using the menu, the dialog asks if you want to subscribe to it also. If you do subscribe, the page and its images are downloaded to your hard drive so you can view the page when you are not online. Neat feature!

A list of all the sites you have subscribed to is kept in the folder  C:\Windows\Subscriptions with information on whether they will update automatically or manually.

 The Channels feature has been removed from IE5. If you upgraded from IE, the Channels can be found in the Channels folder of your Favorites list. Most people did not find this feature very useful after all. It worked well only if you had a very fast, permanent connection to the Internet.

IE5 discards the term subscribe and calls the process what it is - the downloading of pages for viewing offline. The dialog looks like: To see the page when you are not online, just type in the normal address for the site.

Shortcuts to the stored pages are kept in the folder  C:\Windows\Offline Web Pages.

~~  1 Cor. 10:31 ...whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.  ~~

Last updated: 30 Apr 2012