Exploring the World-Wide Web

Browser Basics

The two most popular web browsers are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Both are available for free. While much has been made of the "browser wars," from the point of view of a user, the two products are very similar. This page describes some basic features common to both Navigator and Explorer. For more detailed information about how either browser works, choose "Help" in the menu bar at the top of the screen.

If you are using the Lynx text-mode browser, you should refer to this Lynx-specific tutorial.

A word of caution: both Netscape and Microsoft make available beta versions of forthcoming releases of their browsers. These beta versions are works in progress that allow advanced web users to explore new features and help programmers discover "bugs" (defects in programming). Beta software is not stable and will occasionally crash unexpectedly. For most purposes, you will be better off using the current "release version" rather than one of the betas.

Basic browser features include:

A window displaying the current page

This window behaves like any other window on a Mac or Windows computer: it can be opened, closed, resized, and moved around on the screen. Scroll bars at the right side and bottom of the window allow you to see parts of a page that are not currently visible (the Page Up and Page Down keys also work in Navigator and Explorer). The title of the current page appears in the window's title bar.

If your computer has enough memory, you can run other programs in other windows at the same time, or open several windows within your web browser. This can be extremely convenient if, for example, you need to look up information on the web to include in a document you are composing in a word processor. Or you may wish to leave a web page open for reference in one browser window while visiting new pages in another browser window (you can try by selecting "New" or "New Window" from the "File" menu).

Links that change in color when they have been used

By default, words or phrases on a web page that are links appear underlined and in color -- blue if you have not yet followed them, purple if you have. Click once on a link to follow it to a new page.

A row of buttons at the top of the browser window. These include:

Home button

No matter where you wander where on the web, the button with a picture of a house will bring you back to the home page you have specified in your Preferences.

Back and Forward buttons

Adorned with left- and right-pointing arrows, these buttons will take you back through the pages you have visited since starting up the browser program. Logically enough, the Forward button is only active if you have used the Back button. You can also use the Go menu to retrace the history of your web-browsing session.

Stop button

This button allows you to abort an attempt to retrieve a page from a web server. If a page is loading very slowly, you may want to change your mind and look at something else.

The Go menu

The Go menu maintains a list of the pages you have visited since starting the browser program. You can go back to any of these pages by selecting their titles. This is more efficient than clicking on the Back button repeatedly.

Preferences

Your web browser can be configured in many ways by selecting "Preferences" from the "Edit" menu. You can hide and show different sets of controls and also to tell the web browser whether it should automatically display images when it loads a page (not displaying images can speed up performance a great deal).
Other preferences you can set include the URL for your home page (that is, the page that is loaded when you launch the browser and when you click on the Home button), the fonts used to display text on web pages, your e-mail address, and many other settings. You or your system administrator will need to set these preferences when Navigator or Explorer is installed on your computer, but after that you can leave them alone unless you need to change them.

The Bookmarks or Favorites menu

Often you will discover web pages to which you'd like to come back in the future. The Bookmarks menu (in Navigator) or Favorites menu (in Explorer) allows you to add these pages to a personal list.

Since both browsers are free, you can install both of them on your computer. This is very useful for creators of web pages, who want to ensure that their documents look good in both Navigator and Explorer.

Now you can begin to explore the web in earnest. To know where you're going, you'll need to understand how to read and use URLs.

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Last revised: Fri, Sep 18, 1998, 1:40:30 PM
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