 Hi there, my name is Ken Mayer. I'll be your instructor for this course. I've been involved in some type of computing since 1981. Over that time I've had a lot of experience with different operating systems, with different network infrastructure equipment, with a lot of different types of technologies that we use, both on the internet, both for internal use, and I hope that my skills and my training that I've had will help you in understanding the best ways to be able to work with computing information. In this module we're going to talk about web browsers and the way in which we navigate. My goal is to make sure you understand some of the subtle differences between the different types of web browsers that you can use. We'll also make sure that you understand the way in which you can navigate, which at least is consistent with whichever web browser or web browsers that you choose to use while doing your work on the internet. A web browser is considered a part of what we would call a client-server application. What that generally means is that somewhere in the world there is a server. A server, of course, is just a computer. It could be your desktop PC if you wanted it to be a server. That offers some sort of resource that more than one person can use. That's at least the idea of why we call it a server. It's serving some resource. In this case, it's serving web pages. The complexity of the web pages has certainly changed over time since I first started getting online in the early to mid-90s. A lot of times you'll see these web servers connected to other types of things like databases, but that's really not something that we're going to worry about how to design a page. Just to let you know, there is a lot of complexity that exists today in being able to serve information to you. In that manner, all you have to worry about is having a method of being able to get to that content. We do that with the web browser. When you're going through the internet, and we love to make clouds for the internet, and we'll talk about how to navigate and find these web servers, you need some page, some, I should say, client, that can show you the information that's stored on that web server. The web server has basically just instructional code. That instructional code that's stored in here that you might think of as a web page just has data. There's actually not a nice, pretty web page stored there. It's just programming code that is interpreted by your browser to be able to draw a page for you to be able to see. That instructional code is generally started off in this thing called the Hypertext Markup Language, and that is just a language, a programming language, that the browser can interpret all of the really cool stuff that it sees in that code and make the page that you want. That just means that having a web browser is having a tool that can decode the instructions from the web server to present you with the web page. Of course, as this code has evolved, the things that we see are just getting more and more incredible. Inside of HTML there's different languages you might have heard of, things like Java or maybe you might have heard of people talking about visual basic. Again, these are types of little programs that we can put inside of the HTML page and that, again, your web browser hopefully can interpret to make that content available for you. You may also have heard of this cool animation type of software programming called Flash. Basically, when you open up that web page and you type in the address, the address is what we call a URL, a universal record locator. That's the name that we use for the web page. Your web browser is basically going to send a message over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP and it's going to have in there a GET request. That GET request is generally there to get the home page. The home page is the default page. Unless you specify exactly which page you want to see, you're going to get what we call the home page of that website. All of this code, all of these scripts, all of the attached pictures are all going to be sent back from the web server through that programming language of HTML so that you can then have your web browser draw that page. Now, that's all we're really looking at is we're just saying, hey, this is our way of being able to have a client, have a software program that can interpret the code and show you the results. Now, there are different types of web browsers. Some of the ones that are the most popular, one that's bundled, that's the word we use, with Windows is called Internet Explorer. Now, they say it's free if you have a licensed version of Windows and they all have different kind of little subtle options, but they all do the basic same things. Another very popular web browser is called Firefox. Firefox is kind of an open source, meaning that we have an open group of users out in the world who continually try to submit changes to make Firefox even better. Like I said, this one here is owned by Microsoft and they're the ones that make the updates. A third one that came out a few years ago that seems to be gaining popularity is called Chrome. It comes from Google. I'll try to give you some of the very minimum information so you understand some of the differences. The fourth one that is somewhat still out there, at least talked about, is Opera. And then the fifth one that you see is mostly for the Mac users, which is called Safari. Now, there is actually a Windows version of Safari that you can use. So let's talk about probably the top two or top three Internet Explorer and Firefox. You'll see a lot of arguments between people who are fans of both saying why their browser is better than the other one. What it comes down to is all five of these are able to take the HTML information and turn it into a web page. Some of the differences you might hear is with Internet Explorer, you can use kind of what they call content filtering. If you want kind of being able to put it into a nanny state where you can make sure that adult information doesn't get through or to try to make it a safer browsing experience for your kids, that the Internet Explorer will, through Microsoft and through settings that a lot of websites cooperate with, can be able to tell the browser whether or not it's a page that should be shown or not. They both have the ability to take care of what we call pop-ups, pop-up blockers. A pop-up is, again, part of the code that comes in, can try to convince your web browser to open up an extra window that you didn't want and put it on top of your screen so that you have to kind of look at that advertisement, kind of hoping that you'll click on it and maybe, you know, get interested in some other product. So they both have, well, most of them have pop-up blockers. Firefox is said to be more secure. It seems to be some, you know, again, back to who is a fan of which, because it does have a kind of a built-in firewall that they try to use with Firefox. Internet Explorer and Firefox also have what's called some version of in-private browsing. This can be important. One of the things that you're going to learn as you use your web browser is that it keeps a history of the places you've gone. And if you're at a computer at work or a computer in a public location, then that means that people will be able to know what you've been doing and what sites you've gone to. And so, again, they both have settings that you can help protect yourself, but we'll talk a little more about that when we talk about protecting yourself online. Chrome is told to be kind of a little bit more lightweight. Not a lot of the extra features that I just talked about, like there's no content filtering with Chrome, but people claim that it is just fast, that your web pages will load much faster for you than you would have had otherwise with some of the others. Opera, you know, it's been years since I've used this one. It was one of the first ones, I think, to introduce tabs into the browsing experience, and I'll talk about those. And like I said, Safari is a choice. By the way, you can also have a Firefox for Mac users as well. So maybe I'll put Firefox down here as another option. And these are, of course, web browsers that offer pretty much the same features I just talked about, but they were designed for people using the Apples, what we used to call the Apples, but the Mac versions of PCs, because they have a different operating system. So the subtle differences might be just in a couple of the extra little features. Now I will tell you, and I've seen this enough times, that some web pages were designed for certain types of explorers or browsers. And what that means then is that the people who are developing the web pages have their idea of what they think may be the most popular web browser that's going to be used and try to add in extra little features, you know, the way in which they can present graphics or animation or any of these things that they like to do. And that might mean that they're customized for one browser over the other. I have gone to some web pages where it just doesn't load very well or doesn't run the way it wants to if I use, let's say, Internet Explorer. And so I'll go to that same web page with Firefox and find that it runs brilliantly all the way to, you know, every action that they have. So it's good for you to be able to go out there and maybe get some of these other browsers. They don't take up a lot of storage so that you can also have that experience of being able to see the differences between web pages, how they load, and one over the other. So, again, it's just something to think about. There's no, I guess I could say, perfect web browser. Now, how do we use each of these? When you open up the program, the beginning part of it is generally going to ask you to put in a URL, as I said, the universal record locator. I'll talk a little bit more about that when we talk about these domain names. That's really what it is. It's a domain name. And we'll talk about, you know, how that's kind of broken down. And then when you hit enter or just click on the actual little, maybe some could be an enter, it could be a magnifying glass to search for that web page. That's where you're going to generate the HTTP get and send the request to that web server to retrieve that web page. And then it's going to load in the main display window that you see here. Now, on some web browsers, they are programmed with what's called a home page. A home page is an automatic page that's opened anytime you start the web browser. That's something that you can actually change. I'll show you how to change it. And that way you can have whatever is your favorite page be the first page you see when you open up that browser. From there, your interaction with the web page depends on the type of objects that have been inserted. Now again, remember, these are graphical representations of code. You often will see a text box. The text boxes are generally going to be in this rectangular shape. Often you can see the mouse cursor blinking of where you're at. So you can enter text and it's just designed for the input from your keyboard. Other types of things you might see are links that you can click on. As an example, with whatever page sometimes with Google, you might see this really cool picture that they're wanting to have some sort of daily information, maybe some famous person's birthday. And if you move your mouse over it, you can actually see the mouse kind of change in its shape. And again, it depends on the browser. But it gives you an indication that it's an action that you can click on. We often call it a hyperlink. A hyperlink is really just another URL that you want to go to. And it would have been the same as if you would have taken that hyperlink and typed it up here in the URL address space. But it's a shortcut for you to be able to go to the next page. Sometimes those hyperlinks have code that asks the actual web browser to open it up in a different page. I'll talk about that little differences when we talk about how to navigate. And some, of course, are going to be action buttons. These action buttons could again be a link to a different web page. It could be an action, I'll write action down here, to do some sort of work or computation for you. With the example of Google, if you type something in the text box as some sort of topic you're searching on and then you click on this button, that action is basically sending this data back to Google to their servers to look for all of the websites that might contain those words. Just as a side note, this one would only return one page instead of a list where Google's just going to say, well, we think this is your page that you want. All right, some other parts of the web browser that you'll see is what's often called a menu bar. That's one where you have the series of words that present a list of configuration or other tools. You also have what's often called a tool bar that can be used to provide shortcuts. For instance, if you wanted to go to your home page, you could click on that little house and you would go there. If you wanted to print what you see on the page, you could click on the picture of the printer. So little tools to make your browsing experience work much faster. And depending on companies like Google or like Yahoo, they often have their own customized toolbars that you could install. And those toolbars would show up somewhere in the top that may or may not be something you want. By the way, you've got to be careful. You've got to read everything that you click on to know whether or not you want to install these things. For instance, the Google search bar or toolbar has a little place where instead of you having to go to the home page for Google, you just type your text up here and hit enter, and then it would take you to the resulting searches. In fact, some of the, and again, this is where you have to understand that you have to decide if you want these extra items on your browser. Sometimes when you copy and paste data, the Google toolbar automatically puts that copy and paste or that copied data up here so that it is ready for you to do a search, which actually for me was a convenience. I liked that as a feature. I just talked about this thing called the URL, the Universal Resource Locator. And what it does is represent what we, in the world of computing, we call a fully qualified domain name. Now, the domain names are how we identify with easy-to-read words the location of a server or a computer that we want to connect to. And you often will see, for example, this type of address that you would put into your address bar, Microsoft.com. All right, but you might also see some people just type Microsoft.com and not put the www in the front. By the way, the www was designed to represent the worldwide web. So let's break this down. First, we start off with the domain extensions. And technically speaking, and when we're searching for this address that you want to go to, we actually start doing our search from the left, or I'm sorry, from the right-hand side of the name. And that's because we have this domain hierarchy that actually starts with a dot and then is broken down by these domains. Now, these domains originally were designed to represent certain types of websites. The dot com was usually a business related website. The dot edu was often some sort of a college. Anything that dealt with networking technology or communications technology was the dot net. And as we started running out of these, basically, I shouldn't say we didn't run out of names, but a lot of names started getting reused and reused or wanting to be used, but you could only have one person with those names. And so sometimes somebody who was maybe in a business but had a name they wanted to use would register with a dot net, which was not appropriate because they were a business, not a telecommunications type of a company. But we were kind of lax on the rules about being restrictive. As an example, when I first started trying to make my own pages, I wanted my page to be the initials of my name, my first initial, middle initial, and my last initial, KLM. So I tried to get KLM dot com. Well, unfortunately, somebody beat me to it, a rather large airline over in Europe. I had already registered that name. So if I wanted it, I would have had to make it KLM dot net, but that wasn't actually appropriate for the way in which I wanted to use that. Now, since then, we have a large number of other types of extensions. And by the way, dot gov was usually a government agency. Militaries were dot mill. For us, we're starting to see new things like dot biz as an example. Another example might have been a dot org, which was usually a nonprofit organization. And these extensions are still undergoing changes. The reason I'm bringing it up is that if you get somebody says, hey, you should go look at this website and you can look at this domain that it's underneath, then it gives you an idea of what the content might be like. As an example, there was some argument about whether or not to create a dot XXX, which, you know, being a parent, I think that's great because I can block all these dot XXX through my web browser when so many adult industries are using dot coms, which I guess they can argue they're a commerce, but still it's just, you know, you're wanting to sometimes also protect yourself. You know, another one is a dot TV, which would certainly be, I'm assuming for TV type of content. Now, it's somehow in the United States, it seems as though people think we kind of own the domain extensions. It is a worldwide organization that is trying to come up with these standards. But sometimes when we're going to a business like a dot com, if it's not a US-based business, a business in another country, we started adding country codes into this so that we would be able to have the indication that maybe we're going to a different country's version. For example, at Microsoft.com or Google.com, it's not uncommon to see a dot UK at the end of that so that you knew that was probably the United Kingdom's version of Microsoft.com's homepage. And that was useful because, you know, a lot of the content was in English. If I'm in France and I'm going to the dot FR, then I expect to see that page in French so that people who are French speaking will be able to see the content rather than having to do some translations. All right, so we start off at least with those domain extensions. And then we continue to read from, as I said, from right to left. And so what we do is we then go to that location. So maybe a better example would be this Yahoo. So here's Yahoo and underneath the dot coms. So you can see again how we're going from right to left. Now, in this example, I didn't put a www in there for Microsoft. And so often people will say, well, do I need it? Because if I leave it out, I often end up going to that by default. That's a function of the web browser taking you to what we usually call the home page. That worldwide web is generally where the home page is located. But with companies like Yahoo or Microsoft, let's put another little company over here from the dot com of Microsoft. They have other pages that you might want to go to. And so we continue to name it with this extra domain. In fact, let me put it down here. You could go to technet. And I'm just going to use MS for Microsoft, Microsoft.com. You would actually spell out the whole word Microsoft. There could be training.microsoft.com. And so what you're doing is you're actually going to a different domain with a different home page. And that's all different than the www. But for the most part, www is where you're going to start. And then you can usually get from that home page to these other locations. Now as you're navigating your browser, and again, like I said, there's a variety of different setups as far as where all these little objects are depending on the browser you're using. We're looking at an example of Internet Explorer here. They are going to have navigation arrows. That's going to be these little sets of arrows here. On some browsers, they may be... Well, most of them, they're on that left-hand side by the address bar that we want to use. And so here's the idea that you're at google.com to start with, and you decide to type in something new. So you wipe out what's here, and then you go to your www.abc.com and you hit enter and it takes you to that web page. And then this little back arrow is going to light up. And what that means is that if you're done with that page and you want to go back to Google, instead of having to retype the Google name, you could just click on this little black arrow and it will take you back to the previous web page. Now when I go back to the previous web page, this little arrow is going to light up because that's going to give me the chance to go back to the ABC.com, the page I just left to go back from. And you can hit this back many times. So if you've gone to many different websites, in a row, you could keep hitting the back arrow to get back to your websites that you were at before. There's also going to be a place for favorites. Now favorites, generally you're going to see a little star. I'm not doing a very good job at my 5-pointed star. Let me try that again. I should be able to draw a star. Let's do it the old way. All right, you're going to see like a little star. And that little star is your way of opening up a place called Favorites so that if you did go to ABC.com and you wanted to remember where that place was or it's a web page you think you're going to go to again, under the little favorites, you could add it so that you wouldn't have to remember what that link was. And that's great because as I said, we're trying to make this world of browsing so much easier. So what do you do? You just say, okay, add that to my favorites. Maybe next week you say, oh, where was that place that I liked? Well, you just open up your favorites. You'll see the list of what you've chosen. Hopefully you remember which one it was. If you have a lot of them, you click on it and it takes you right there. Those items that you click on to get from one page to the other, as I said, are hyperlinks. Generally speaking, when you see a hyperlink, and this is something I'll talk more about in security, when you see a hyperlink, you're going to see something that says My Website and it's usually blue and underlined. That's just the kind of standard format of a hyperlink. So you know it's not just regular text. And hopefully to kind of warn you, you know, don't click on it unless you want to go to a new location. Now something I want to tell you at the bottom of your web browser, or if you leave your mouse, depending on the web browser you use, if you leave your mouse over the website, you might actually see the URL of where that link is going to take you. And that's kind of also, to me, kind of a safety indicator. Because if I move my mouse over it and then I see what it's actually going to take me to, it lets me know if it's something that I can verify. A lot of times in our email, you might see a link to, maybe another hyperlink that says, you know, your bank. And so you're saying, oh great, I need to go to my bank and you move your mouse over it. And it's actually some, we'll call it www, some hacker site.com where they're trying to fool you into going to places that you thought was legitimate but actually weren't. So the hyperlink contains words that are presented on the web page. But in the background, the code is showing them the actual URL of where it's going to go if you actually click on it. Like I said, your history is there as a benefit to you. By putting your history in place, what we're hoping is that if you remembered, let's say, last Saturday, I was at a museum site and I want to go back to it and I don't remember what it is. You can open up the list of your history. It's usually organized by each day or if it's a long time ago, it might say last week. And you open up that day's history and then you can go through the list of all the places you've been to. There's also a number of plugins that can also be helpful for you. As an example of one of your links was going to open up a PDF file or a Word document. Rather than you having to download that file and open it in that program, you often will have a plugin that's put into the browser and that plugin would allow you to have a viewer so you could see that document while still using just the web browser. Some plugins can be dangerous. Some plugins can be, I mean, extremely helpful. If there's a link to email somebody, it's great to have a plugin that could maybe help open up the right email client that you're going to use and be able to start generating your emails. So we're going to show you some demonstrations of how to search with a variety of different search engines. Being is certainly one of them. But basically the idea is that with a search engine that you're going to come up with the text of what you want to search for. Now different search engines will have a variety of methods of being able to present you with search options. They almost all have a text box. Well, you'll type in your search terms and then, of course, it'd enter and it would result in a series of websites that might be what you're looking for. Often some of those sites are up on the top of this because they either really are what you're looking for. Some might be at the top of the list because they're paying for extra advertisement. But we'll leave that for the demonstration to show you how to do searches. What is important is that sometimes you may see a link that you like and you want to look at it, but you don't want to lose the actual page that you're on with all these search results. So when you see something like, you know, again, you'll see some www.abc.com and often you'll see some text below it that tells you a little bit about why that might be and this is underlined so that you can click on it and go to that actual website. What I want to tell you is that when you move your mouse over the top of this link and do a right click on that link, it will not immediately take you to that website. One of the options you'll have and you're going to have a little menu pop up and this little menu is going to, depending again on the browser, the order of these will be different. We'll see something about open in a new window. One will say open in a new tab. The reason I bring it up is that I often do this. I'll just choose the open in a new tab because here this is the page you were on that showed you all of your search options. This is another tab and basically what it is is it allows you to have multiple web pages open without having to have multiple Internet explorers or Firefox windows open. It's easier than having to keep switching open windows to just click on the next tab and say, hey, that's what I wanted and I still have my search results that are there and you can do that multiple times and have a lot of tabs open. It's just a way of being able to say, okay, show me the content. The content would be in the new tab and then you still have your search results on the original tab that you started on and it's easy. You just click on which tab you want to view and you can just go back and forth very easily. Now sometimes you're going to be asked to download or upload files. When you download files, hopefully you have some sort of antivirus software on your system so that it can scan the file to make sure that it's safe and you have to remember, depending on the operating system, that the files that you download will probably go to a folder called Downloads. Something just again that I tell you to think about, you can also, when you get asked about a file, you often will see, at least in the newer versions of Internet Explorer, a little box at the bottom that you could say something like Run, if it's a executable file, or you'll have a little box here that says Save and it has a little down arrow. Now if you click Save, it's going to go to the Downloads folder. If you click that little down arrow, you're going to see something that says Save As and with the Save As, you can then decide which folder you want to save the file in so that it may be easier for you to find. You'll also probably see a button that says something about canceling that option so that you're not downloading a file if you maybe accidentally clicked. And by the way, it is easy to accidentally click some things as you're moving your mouse around a web page and you're just not thinking about it and you hit that button and boom, something starts to download.