Web Browsers
If you want to type a letter, look at a picture and listen to music on your home computer, you have to open three separate programs. What a web browser does is allow all sorts of file types to be displayed via one program.
It also works across all platforms, meaning Windows, Apple and Linux. The browser may only work on that specific platform, but the contents of the Internet come across the same as in other platforms.
The Big Kahuna is, of course, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) because it comes with every version of Windows Operating System. At its peak 93% of Internet surfers used IE. Microsoft has announced it is working on IE7 to replace the current IE6.
Microsoft built in all these neat bells and whistles that are useful in a secure corporate intranet but left openings for hackers when it’s connected to the Internet. Microsoft continually publishes security patches to try and correct these threats.
Netscape was the predominant browser many years ago before being pummeled by IE. It is still around in limited form but not used much at all.
Mozilla is a free browser
based on the Netscape code and is starting to encroach on IE’s dominance. The terminology is a little strange… Mozilla.org has Mozilla, which is a combined browser, email client and newsgroup reader like Netscape. If you prefer you can just download the browser, called Firefox or just the email client, called Thunderbird.
Mozilla browsers have a feature called Tabbed Browsing which lets you open many sites and move from site to site using tabs at the top of the window, unlike IE which forces you to open a new window to have more than one site up at a time.
It’s also more secure than IE, although as it gains in popularity hackers are finding holes there, too.
TIP: Make sure your browser is set to automatically check
for updates.
Opera, available at www.opera.com, is a $39 browser and email client that touts itself as being fast, safe and full featured. It also includes tabbed browsing.
The main feature of all browsers is the Bookmarks, which IE calls Favorites. With it you can save links to web sites that you have visited, organizing them into folders for future use. As with your computers files and folders, the better organized you are when saving them, the easier they will be to find later. Browsers can import Favorites/Bookmarks from other browsers so you don’t have to worry about starting to use a new browser.
