How can I print a simple page without getting all the side box information and several wasted pages?

Different websites have different setups and characteristics. Some will let you print everything on that webpage, others will only print certain sections or text or just junk. Most will only print a small section of what is visible on your screen or just certain window boxes etc. It's very hard to tell what each will do. You can try a print preview first, but even that isn't always accurate, but it is a much better way to tell what you'll get. If you are trying to print something that is long and doesn't show everything in one screen on your monitor or has lots of other sidebar boxes and such, you should try highlighting everything you want to print, then right click on the highlighted material, select "Print" and choose "Selection" under "Print Range". Sometimes that works pretty well. The other option would be to copy that highlighted section and paste it into a word processing document like Word, Notepad, Wordpad, etc., edit it as you want, then print it from there.