A web browser is a program on your computer that allows you to look at web pages. Generally, you type an address in the address bar, and the web browser fetches the file and displays it. If you type the wrong address, it shows you an error message.
Most web browsers have some kind of search capability. Many people who don't understand much about computers are confused about the roles of search engines and web browsers. A web browser is not a search engine. A search engine is a website that has an index of other web pages and helps you find web pages on a specific subject. A web browser is a program on your local computer that allows you to view web pages. They are not at all the same thing.
The reason people get confused is because many of the web browsers have little boxes where you can type searches. These searches are then forwarded to the search engine website which sends back a list of pages that match the search. The user who doesn't understand much assumes that the browser is doing the search, but that's not the case.
The original Web Browser was NCSA Mosaic, written by Marc Andresen and the folks at the NCSA supercomputer center in Illinosi in 1992. Mosaic was not actually the original web browser, but it's the first one that could show pictures, and it's the grandfather of every web browser available today. There is a very nice article on Mosaic on Wikipedia (click here).
Microsoft has a browser called "Internet Explorer", which is in fact, a rewritten version of Mosaic designed for use on windows. Explorer is reliable and does a completely find job of browsing web pages.
Unfortunately, Explorer also has a history of security issues, and so a version of Explorer called "Firefox" has been created. Firefox is free and is a complete replacement for Explorer. If you want a copy you can download it for free from http://www.mozilla.org.
Apple has a browser called Safari. It's about the same as Explorer. There is also a version of Firefox that runs on Mac, and it's more or less equivalent.
There is also a Google browser called "Chrome" and another called "Opera". They all seem to work, you can try them and decide which one you like best.
Each web browser is a bit different, but they all share some common features. I will use Firefox for my explanation, but others are pretty much the same.
All websites have an address, which we call the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). The web browser has space at the top called the "Address Bar" where you can enter these URL's. Do not put questions or random data in the address field. The only thing that belongs here is a URL.
In the image above you can see the URL I'm looking at, an internet radio site called "Jango". To get there I typed the address, "www.jango.com", but now I am on one of the subpages of that site. It's playing the song "For what it's worth" by Buffalo Springfield.
Many web browsers have the ability to try and guess what you are typing, often based on sites that you have visited before. I find this more annoying than helpful, and I usually turn it off.
If you don't know what URL you want to look at, you can put the URL of one of the search engines such as google.com, yahoo.com, or bing.com.
A search engine has a searchable list of websites and will help you locate things on the internet.
Let's try it. Go to one of the search engines. I'm going to type the address of google in the address bar and go to the main Google page. If you try it your screen should look like this:
The address displayed is http://www.google.com. This is the address of the page I am looking at.
Make sure you type the address in the address bar and not in the search box on the right side of the screen.
Now I'm going to do a search. In the google search box, in the center of the screen, I'm going to type "PDQ Bach", to see if I can find some pages about this important classical composer.
The google website is able to look things up very quickly, and start listing out answers before I've even finished typing.
The important thing to rememeber here is that Google is a website. It's not a program, and it's not a feature of the browser. You can consult the Google database from any web browser from any computer. You can think of Google as the library card catalogue of the Internet.
If you get to a page and then want to go to the previous one, hit the back button.
The web browser has an area where you can type your searchs, skipping the need to go to a search engine page. You can choose which search engine the browser uses for the searches. Click on the down arrow on the left side of the search bar and you will see these choices:
Google and Yahoo are good searches. So is Bing from Microsoft. I would not set my search engine to Ebay (unless shopping is all I'm interested in) or Wikipedia (while it's a good site it's very liminting to make this your search engine.) If you don't see the search engine you want, click "Manage Search Engines" and you can select others (such as Bing).
You can have more than one page open with firefox.
The pages you have open are visible in the "tab bar" which you can see in this image:
We have two open pages: Mozilla and Microsoft. Microsoft is in the foreground. If I click on Mozilla then it will come to the foreground:
If I want to open another tab I can click the "+" button.
The menu goes across the top of the screen.
The Firefox menu choices are File, Edit, View, History, Bookmarks, Tools, Window, and Help.
Notice that the menu isn't actually attached to the Firefox window. If you move the window around, the menu stays in place.
Notice also that the Google page we are looking at has its own menu (web images videos maps etc.)
You can find the preferences under the Firefox menu:
I'm not going to go through all the preferences, but I'll hilight a few that may be of interest.
Here are the general preferences (click "general")
There are two preferences that you might want to set here. One is the startup page. I have this set to Mozilla but you might want to set it to something else such as Google. This is also where we set the download area. I have it set to the downloads folder but if you want downloaded files to go somewhere else (like the desktop) this is the place to set it.
Next we will look at the "content" options:
Here you can block popups (usually I have this one but right now it's off) and enable Javascript, if you want to.
Next we will look at the privacy options. (We're skipping some of the other options which are less interesting.)
This is where you can turn cookies off and on, and also turn the history off and on. I'm not a big fan of cookies, but some sites required them. Cookies are little files that a website can keep on YOUR computers. I don't like other people saving files on my computer so I usually like to have this off, but my bank requires cookies if I want to use their site. If I have cookies off then the login for my bank doesn't work. Apparently it uses a cookie to remember that I have logged into their site. So for now I have left cookies on.
On the history, I don't like to have other people follow my tracks, so I turn history off most of the time.
Next let's look at security:
You can see the settings I have set. I want to know about attack sites and forgeries, and I don't want anybody installing anything on my computer without telling me. I don't want the computer to remember passwords. This sounds like it might be convenient at first, but what if I get up from my computer and someone else sits down and wants to access my bank account or email? That's no good so I turn this off.
