In the examples, I use the versions of a couple of browsers I've got installed. The commands may not be the exact same in your version, but the principles are the same, just like they are in most other browsers.
The presentation hints, if any, in my documents are all
via style sheets/CSS1, so you can always get your own
defaults by turning off your style sheet support.
(Hopefully you won't have to, as I've tried to be
careful, but if you do, please
mail me
and tell me what went wrong.)
In MS Internet Explorer you can turn all or some of them off via the menus [ View | Options | General, Multimedia ].
In Netscape Navigator, you can select or deselect loading of inline images with [ Options | Auto Load Images ].
After having turned off loading of inline images, you can always load the images one by one if they seem interesting or useful, and usually all of them on a page with a single command when you reach documents where you want to see them all.
In Netscape Navigator you can disable Java and JavaScript via the menus [ Options | Network Preferences | Languages ].
In MS Internet Explorer you can disable Java, ActiveX scripts and ActiveX controls via the menus [ View | Options | Security ].
You should set your browser to display contrasting and pleasing colours. Often this can mean dark, almost black, text on a very light grey, yellow or beige background, with link colours contrasting so they stand out but don't glare.
For some strange reason for some of the common browsers come with factory defaults which are not particularily pleasing to the eye, like a rather dark grey background, or with the wrong system colours, not those you use as text and background in other applications...
If you choose a good font, you can reduce the font size without making it hard to read, thus enabling you to fit in more text on a given surface, which makes for less scrolling.
The font size should also be set in conjunction with how wide window you are using, both too long and too short lines are uncomfortable to read. Most people think a line length of 55 to 75 characters is pleasing.
In MS Internet Explorer [ View | Options | Colors & Links ] and deselect "Use Windows Colors" and choose colours you like, if your screen can display many colours it's probably a good idea to define a nice light (but not 100% white) background which is not one of the basic ones you get to choose from. Do this for text, background, visited and unvisited links.
In Netscape Navigator the menus are [ Options | General Preferences | Colors ] where you mark that you want to use custom colours for links, followed links, text and background. I recommend that you also select "Always use my colors".
If you select "Always use my colors", you might run afoul of authors who use FONT COLOR and TD BGCOLOR, because they might be the same or close to your text and background colours. But you might anyway, because those elements assume, but don't require, that the author have set default colours for the whole document (and by extension that the user uses those colours). It's far from unlikely that the author will use these elements in a way that works with his browser defaults, thinking that everyone else have their browsers set up the same, unfortunately.
The only way to guard oneself against documents made unreadable with FONT COLOR, TD BGCOLOR or only some of the five colours that go with BODY, is to use a browser which always uses your colours by simply not recognizing FONT COLOR and the like (which probably can be achieved by hacking the binary of browsers which do, the legality of which may be questionable).
You can actually also set colours in a personal style sheet, even for MS Internet Explorer 3, but the function isn't documented.
In Windows 95, for example, you simply go to the directory C:\WINDOWS\FONTS and delete or move the unwanted fonts. If you want to see how they appear, you can double click on them.
The problem is of course that sometimes you've got fonts which work well on paper, but not so well on the screen, so you might want to retain them anyway, or perhaps something else you do require that you have certain fonts installed.
In MS Internet Explorer it's via [ View | Options | General | Font Settings ].
Then choose both proportional and fixed pitch fonts of a kind which you find pleasing on the screen you're using and with the font sizes appropriate to the window size.
If you've got a style sheet capable browser, you can usually also set a personal style sheet with your font preferences.
Under View, Internet Options, Accessibility you can tell the browser to always use your colours, fonts and font sizes. This is a really good function.
Document created 1997 June 22, last modified 1999 Jan 13, content reviewed 2002 Sep 06
griffon@canit.se