You can choose to set custom colors for Text, Links, Followed Links, and Page Backgrounds. If you want to view the pages you visit as they were originally designed, you should allow the page to override your color settings and set the background choice to default. Another preference setting which drives some people up the wall is the Default Home Page. This is the setting which causes a certain page to load when you launch or start your browser. Image Loading is a matter of your personal preference.
Most browsers allow images to load as the page loads or after the page loads.
Experiment with this setting and see which you like. One of the most important preference settings you can make is how pages are updated. When you first visit a new page, all of the components which make up the page are cached or stored on your computer. When you return to that page, your browser looks in this cache first for the page components. This is a great trick, but depending on how you have the Page Update preference set, it can cause old or outdated information to be loaded.