Chapter 6
In This Chapter
Understanding web pages and URLs
Pointing, clicking, browsing, and other basic skills
Opening lots of web pages at the same time
Discovering the web from your phone
Discovering Internet Explorer and Firefox
Installing a browser other than Internet Explorer
People now talk about the web more than they talk about the Internet. The World Wide Web and the Internet aren’t the same thing — the World Wide Web (which we call the web because we’re lazy typists) lives “on top of” the Internet. The Internet’s network is at the core of the web, and the web is an attractive parasite that requires the Net for survival. However, so much of what happens online is on the web that you aren’t really online until you know how to browse the web.
This chapter explains what the web is and where it came from. Then it describes how to install and use some popular web browsers and how to use web browsers to display web pages. If you’re already comfortable using the web, skip to Chapter 7.
So what is the web, already? The World Wide Web is a bunch of “pages” of information connected to each other around the globe via the Internet. Each page can be a combination of text, pictures, audio clips, video clips, animations, fill-in-the-blank forms, and other stuff. (People add new types of other stuff every day.)
What makes web pages interesting (aside from the fact that there seems to be a web page about every topic you can possibly think of) is that they contain links that point to other web pages. When you click a link, your browser fetches the page the link connects to. (Your browser is the program that shows you the web — read more about it in a couple of pages.) Links make connections that let you go directly to related information. These invisible connections between pages resemble the threads of a spider web — as you click from web page to web page, you can envision the “web” created by the links.
Figure 6-1 shows a web page. Underlined phrases are links to other web pages, but a lot of non-underlined text is, too — move the mouse pointer around a page and see wherever it turns into a little hand. Anywhere a hand appears is a link, even if it isn’t underlined. Pictures can be links, too.
What’s remarkable about the web is that it connects pieces of information from all around the planet, on different computers and in different databases (a feat you would be hard pressed to match with a card catalog in a brick-and-mortar library). Pages can be linked to other pages anywhere in the world so that when you’re on the web, you can end up looking at pages from Singapore to Calgary, or from Sydney to Buenos Aires, all faster than you can say “Bob’s your uncle,” usually. You’re only seconds away from almost any site, anywhere in the world.
An important characteristic of the web is that you can search it — over a trillion pages. For example, in fewer than ten seconds, you can find a list of web pages that contain the phrase domestic poultry or your own name or the name of a book you want to find out about. You can follow links to see each page on the list to find the information you want. See Chapter 13 to see how to use a search engine to search the web.
Before you jump onto the web (boing-g-g — that metaphor needs work), you need to know one more basic concept: Every web page has a web address so that browsers, and you, can find it. Great figures in the world of software engineering (one guy, actually, named Sir Tim Berners-Lee) named this address the Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. Every web page has a URL, a series of characters that begins with http://. (How do you say URL? Everyone we know pronounces each letter, “U-R-L” — no one says “earl.”) Many URLs include the letters www, but not all do. Now you know enough to go browsing. For more entirely optional details about URLs, see the later sidebar “Duke of URL.”
It’s time to check out the web for yourself, using a browser, the program that finds web pages and displays them on your screen. Fortunately, if you have any recent version of Windows, any recent Mac, any netbook, almost any other computer with Internet access, or a smartphone or tablet, you probably already have a browser.
Here are the most popular browsers:
We describe Chrome and Firefox in detail in this book, and we mention Internet Explorer and Safari here and there. All browsers are similar, enabling you to view web pages, print them, and save the addresses of your favorite pages so that you can return to them later. If you want to try a different browser, see the section “Getting and Installing a Browser,” later in this chapter.
When you start your web browser — Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, or whatever — you see a window that displays one web page, with menus and icons along the top. Figure 6-1 (shown earlier in this chapter) illustrates Firefox, Figure 6-2 shows Google Chrome, Figure 6-3 shows Internet Explorer, and Figure 6-4 shows Apple’s Safari. Other browsers look similar, but with different menus and icons along the top.
The main section of the browser window is taken up by the web page you’re looking at. After all, that’s what the browser is for — displaying a web page. Which page your browser displays at startup — your start page — depends on how it’s set up. Many ISPs arrange for your browser to display their home pages; otherwise, until you choose a home page of your own, IE tends to display a Microsoft page, Firefox and Chrome usually show a Google search page, and Safari shows a page from the Apple website. Chapter 7 explains how to set the start page to a web page you want to see.
The buttons, bars, and menus around the edge help you find your way around the web and do things such as print and save pages. Here are some of the most important buttons and menus at the top of your browser window:
The rest of this chapter explains how to use these and other features of your browser.
You need two simple skills (if we can describe something as basic as making a single mouse click as a skill) to get going on the web. One is to move from page to page on the web, and the other is to jump directly to a page when you know its URL (web address). Okay, we know that you aren’t actually moving — your web browser displays one page after another — but browsing feels as though you’re cruising (or surfing, depending on which metaphor you prefer) around the web.
Moving from page to page is easy: Click any link that looks interesting. That’s it. Underlined blue text and blue-bordered pictures are links, and sometimes other things are, too. Anything that looks like a button is probably a link. You can tell when you’re pointing to a link because the mouse pointer changes to a little hand. Clicking outside a link selects the text you click, as in most other programs. Sometimes, clicking a link moves you to a different place on the same page rather than to a new page.
Sometimes, clicking a link opens the new page in a new browser window or tab — your browser can display more than one web page at the same time, each in its own window or in tabs in one window. If a link opens a new window or tab, the Back button does nothing in that window, but you can still switch back to the old window by clicking it.
Someone tells you about a cool website and you want to take a look. Here’s what you do:
Figures 6-1, 6-2, 6-3, and 6-4 show where the Address bar is.
The URL is similar to http://net.gurus.org — you can just type net.gurus.org and your browser supplies the http:// part. Be sure to delete the URL that appeared before you started typing.
If you receive URLs in email, instant messages, or documents, you can usually click on them — many programs pass along the address to your browser. Or, use the standard cut-and-paste techniques and avoid retyping:
That is, use your mouse to select the URL so that the whole URL is highlighted.
You find out more about how to find things on the web in Chapter 13, but for now, here’s a good way to get started: Go to the Yahoo! News page. To get to Yahoo! News, type this URL in your browser’s Address bar and then press Enter:
news.yahoo.com
The Yahoo! website includes lots of different features, but its news site should look familiar — it’s similar to a newspaper on steroids. Just nose around, clicking links that look interesting and clicking the Back button on the toolbar when you make a wrong turn. We guarantee that you’ll find something interesting.
Here are some links not to click:
If one of these messages appears in a browser window, the safest thing to do is to close the window by clicking the X box in the upper-right corner (or on a Mac, the red Close button in the upper-left corner).
Sometimes, a web page becomes garbled on the way in or you interrupt it (by clicking the Stop button on the toolbar or by pressing the Esc key). You can tell your browser to retrieve the information on the page again. Click the Reload button (shown in Figures 6-1, 6-2, 6-3, and 6-4) or press Ctrl+R (Windows) or Command+R (Mac).
Sooner or later, even the most dedicated web surfer has to stop to eat or attend to other personal needs. You leave your browser in the same way you leave any other program: Click the Close (X) button in the upper-right corner of the window (or on a Mac, the red Close button in the upper-left corner) or press Alt+F4 (Windows) or Command+W (Mac). Or, just leave the program running and walk away from your computer. If you have multiple tabs open (described in “Tab dancing,” later in this chapter), the program asks whether you want to close them all.
When we’re pointing and clicking from one place to another, we like to open a bunch of browser windows so that we can see where we’ve been and go back to a previous page by just switching to another window. You can also arrange windows side by side, which is a good way to, say, compare prices for The Internet For Dummies at various online bookstores. (The difference may be small, but when you’re buying 100 copies for everyone on your Christmas list, those pennies can add up. Oh, you weren’t planning to do that? Drat.) Your browser can also display lots of web pages in one window, by using tabs (as explained in the section “Tab dancing,” a little later in this chapter).
To display a page in a new browser window, click a link with the right mouse button and choose Open in New Window (or Open Link in New Window) from the menu that pops up. To close a window, click the Close (X) button in the upper-right corner of the window frame or press Alt+F4, the standard close-window shortcut. (On a Mac, click the red button in the upper-left corner of the window or press Command+W.)
You can also create a new window without following a link: Press Ctrl+N. (Mac users, press Command+N.)
We’ve all heard about how multitasking is a bad idea, but sometimes it’s very useful to have several web pages open at the same time. Web browsers have tabs, which are multiple pages you can switch among in a window. Figures 6-1, 6-2, 6-3, and 6-4 show browsers with several tabs across the top. The name of the tab is shown on each tab, like old-fashioned manila folder tabs. One tab corresponds to the page you see; that tab is a brighter color.
Just click a tab to show the page. To make a new, empty tab, click the New Tab (the tiny, blank tab to the right of the other tabs), press Ctrl+T (Windows) or Command+T (Mac), or right-click an existing tab and choose New Tab from the menu that appears. You can also open a new tab by right-clicking a link and choosing Open in New Tab (or Open Link in New Tab) from the menu that pops up. Click the X on the tab to get rid of it, or right-click the tab and choose Close Tab. (You may have to hover the mouse on the tab to see its X.)
For most purposes, we find tabs more convenient than windows, but multiple windows are useful if you want to compare two web pages side by side. You can use both tabs and windows; each window can have multiple tabs. In most browsers, you can drag a tab from one browser window to another, or drag a tab out to the desktop to make a new window. And like all windows, you can drag their edges to move or resize them.
Internet-connected phones and tablets — such as the iPhone and iPad and Android and Windows Mobile phones and tablets — can browse the web, too. Some use your cell connection to load pages and others use Wi-Fi. Of course, on a phone you can see only teeny, tiny web pages on their teeny, tiny screens, but phone-based browsing can still be incredibly useful, especially when you’re looking for a good restaurant recommendation. The iPad and other Wi-Fi-connected tablets have browsers, too, and their screens are large enough for a tolerable browsing experience.
The iPhone and iPad come with Safari, Android phones come with Google Chrome, and Windows Mobile phones come with IE. All these pint-size browsers have Back buttons and Address bars and most of the same basic features as their larger siblings.
Chances are, a browser is already installed on your computer. If you use Internet Explorer, we think you’re better off installing either Firefox or Chrome, for speed and safety reasons. Fortunately, browser programs aren’t difficult to find and install, and Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are all free.
To get Firefox (for Windows or Mac or any of the other dozen computers it runs on), visit www.mozilla.com. For Chrome, go to www.google.com/chrome. To get or upgrade Internet Explorer, go to www.microsoft.com/ie. Safari is available at www.apple.com/safari. Use your current browser to go to the page and then follow the instructions for finding and downloading the program. (Take a look at Chapter 7 for advice about downloading files.) If you are using a smartphone or tablet, go to your app store (the App Store on Apple devices and the Play Store on Androids).
To run your new browser, click the browser’s attractive new icon. If you use Windows, the default browser also appears at the top of the left column of the Start menu, too.
Your new browser will probably ask whether you want to import your settings — including your bookmarks and favorites — from the browser program you’ve been using. If you’ve already been using the web for a while and have built up a list of your favorite websites (as described in Chapter 7), take advantage of this opportunity to copy your list into the new browser so that you don’t have to search for your favorite sites all over again.
It will also ask whether to make it the “default” browser, that is, the one used when another program opens a web page. Browsers are very jealous, so if you don’t say yes, it’ll keep asking you each time you run it. Or if you do say yes, the next time you run any other browser, that browser, feeling jilted, will offer to make itself your default. Our advice is that once you find a browser you like, make it your default and stick with it.
Apple’s iOS devices don’t let you change the default browser from Safari. If you use an Android device, you can change the default; open Settings, choose More, choose Application Manager, and scroll right to choose All. Then choose the current default browser and choose Clear Defaults. The next time you click a link in an email or other message, Android will ask what program to use; choose your favorite browser.