Basic Browsing

This article is the third in a series on making use of the Internet adapted adult-education Internet course given at the Saugus Senior Center through Saugus.net.

A major theme of the course is that to really get the most effective use from the Internet it's necessary to have up-to-date tools, and one of the most important Internet tools is a Web browser. Unfortunately, even in this day and age, most computers do not come with a modern browser factory installed. Thus the first two papers in this series were focused on getting a modern browser and keeping it up-to-date for those who have computers without modern browsers built-in. This generally means people using MS-Windows, so those past two articles were a little MS-Windows-centric. Of course, MS-Windows computers are not the only types of computers available in the world, and Firefox is not the only modern browser. This article will also consider Safari, another browser (currently available only for Mac OS X that fully supports modern Web standards.

The first screen shot (the one on the left) shows the Saugus.net main page as it appears when viewed with Firefox (the latest is version 1.0.3 as of this writing). The second one (the one on the right) shows the same view as presented by Safari (the latest is version 2.0 as of this writing). Both were captured on a Mac OS X system, but unfortunately the window widths are not identical so there are some minor differences in how things are laid out. We're not really interested in the differences, though; we're interested in the general concepts and what can be found where.

The first thing to note is that in the topmost section of each browser there's a line stating the title of the page, and directly below it is line with a handful of icons and a couple of text windows. Below that there's a line with some short groups of words. There is also a line at the very bottom which is empty on Safari and shows both the word "Done" and an orange box on Firefox. These four lines are generated by the browser and not by the Web page being viewed. The big middle section of both browsers is what's actually found on the Web page.

The second line from the top provides you with the basic browser controls. Both browsers have back and forward buttons, a refresh / reload button, and a home button. Firefox additionally has a stop loading button (in Safari, the reload button doubles as a stop loading button). Safari additionally has extra buttons for making text larger or smaller (Firefox provides this utility through its View menu) and a button for adding a bookmark (Firefox provides this utility through its Bookmarks menu). The first text input box is used for directly inputing a URL -- a Uniform Resource Locator. A URL is just a fancy way of indicating the address of something on the Internet. All URLs are unique, so a URL will represent a specific Web page or other Internet resource. This text box is called either the URL box or the location box, and is used when you know the location of something. For example, you could directly type in Saugus.net or Amazon.com and the browser will pull up the appropriate sites. You'll notice that this first text box also contains a small icon in both browsers; this icon is actually determined by the page you're viewing. The second text box is the search box -- it's used when you don't know the specific address of the Web site you're seeking. Typing in key words (or phrases surrounded by quotes) there will perform a Web search and will display a (usually extremely long) list of pages that contain the words you've entered. Both browsers use Google for their default searches; Firefox additionally allows you to search via other tools via the drop-down menu accessible through the little "G" icon.

The third line consists of bookmarks -- each points to a page within a Web site in the way that a bookmark points to a page within a book. You can set these to whatever you want them to be.

The bottom line is the status line. If the browser wants to tell you something, it's apt to appear down here. Firefox also uses this line to point out RSS feeds; that's what the little orange box is doing, in fact -- it's telling you that there's an RSS feed available for the currently displayed page. Safari also points out RSS feeds for pages, but it does it in the URL area via a little blue box. RSS feeds provide quick ways of exploring what's new on sites that support them; we'll look at them in more detail in a later article.

In this article we'll cover a couple more concepts: home pages, bookmarks, and history.

Your home page is the page that gets displayed when you first turn your browser on or when you click the home page icon. Since you're going to see it every time you first start your browser, it makes sense to choose for this page something that you read fairly frequently and/or makes it easy to find pages that you read frequently. For both Firefox and Safari it's set via the general options.

The general options can be found under the Tools / Options menu under MS-Windows and under either Firefox / Preferences or Safari / Preferences on Mac OS X for Firefox and Safari respectively. Each displays a panel like the ones shown above (on the left for Firefox and the right for Safari). Each panel has multiple tabs; we'll look at the others besides the general one in a later article. For now, just note that each allows the setting of the home page via a text box in which you can directly type a URL or by various other methods, the most useful of which tends to be a button that will set your home page to the currently displayed page.

Bookmarks are also used for frequently viewed pages. More generally though they're used for any pages that you want to be able to find easily later. Sometimes you'll also hear bookmarks referred to as "favorites", so don't get confused. Both Firefox and Safari have a Bookmarks menu that will allow you to bookmark a current page, manage your collection of bookmarks, or jump to a page you have already bookmarked. Safari additionally has an icon in its second line for bookmarking the current page, and an icon in its third line for managing your bookmarks collection.

Both browsers allow you to make bookmarks folders for holding collections of bookmarks. This way it's possible to have hundreds of bookmarks and still keep them reasonably well organized. Both browsers allow the titling of individual bookmarks and bookmark folders, and Firefox additionally allows you to attach comments as well. The best way to get used to bookmarks is to play around with them a little; you'll quickly get the hang of how they work.

Each browser also has a special bookmarks folder. Called the "Bookmarks Toolbar Folder" in Firefox and the "Bookmarks Bar" in Safari, it's the folder that designates the bookmarks that appear in the special bookmarks line mentioned earlier.

The last topic we'll cover in this article is the concept of browser history. The basic idea is that as you're browsing the Web, your browser will remember individual pages that you've visited. You can navigate back and forth through your recent history via the back and forward buttons; however, you're not limited to simply clicking them. If you hold the buttons down a short while, each produces a drop-down list of recent sites making it possible to skip around through your recent history. There's even still more that you can do with browser history. Firefox has a Go menu, and Safari has a History menu that provide access to much more extensive lists of visited sites that can go back days or even weeks. With Firefox, choosing the Go / History menu item brings up a sidebar with the browser history organized by days. With Safari, the day-by-day breakdown is available directly through the History menu, or via a special collection of bookmarks accessible through the bookmark management screen.