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Directly beneath every folder's title bar lives the Address Bar, shown atop the Documents folder in Figure 1. Internet veterans will experience déjà vu: Vista's Address Bar is lifted straight from the top of Internet Explorer and glued atop every folder.
Figure 1: Each folder sports an Address Bar, much like the one in Internet Explorer.
The Address Bar's three main parts, described from left to right in the following list, perform three different duties:
- Backward and Forward buttons: These two arrows keep track as you forage through your PC's folders. The Backward button backtracks to the folder you just visited. The Forward arrow brings you back. (Click the miniscule arrow to the right of the Forward arrow to see a list of places you've visited previously; click any entry to zoom right there.)
- Address Bar: Just as Internet Explorer's Address Bar lists a Web site's address, Vista's Address Bar displays your current folder's address — its location inside your PC. For example, the Address Bar shown in Figure 1 shows three words: Andy, Documents, and Stuff. Those words tell you that you're looking inside the Stuff folder inside the Documents folder of Andy's user account.
 | Feel free to type a Web site's address — something like Yahoo.com — into any folder's Address Bar. Your folder will summon Internet Explorer, which opens to that particular site. |
- Search box: In another rip-off from Internet Explorer, every Vista folder sports a Search box. Instead of searching the Internet, though, it rummages through your folder's contents. For example, type the word carrot into a folder's Search box: Vista digs through that folder's contents and retrieves every file mentioning the term carrot.
To expand your search beyond that particular folder, click the arrow next to the Search box's magnifying glass icon. A drop-down menu lets you route your search to your entire PC or even the Internet.
Several other areas of the Address Bar deserve mention:
| - In the Address Bar, notice the little arrows between the words Andy, Documents, and Stuff? The arrows offer quick trips to other folders. Click any arrow — the one to the right of the word Documents, for example. A little menu drops down from the arrow, letting you jump to any other folder inside your Documents folder.
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- When sending a search to the Internet, the Search box normally routes entries off to Microsoft's own Search Provider. To send the search to any other search engine, fire up Internet Explorer, click the little arrow next to the Search box's magnifying glass, and choose Find More Providers.
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