Your Broswer: A Basic Understanding

This tutorial is designed to provide a basic introduction to browsing and searching on the Internet. We all started here at one time or another, learning the basics and trying to figure out how to surf the Internet. It gets frustrating at times as we learn, and all those coffee cups you will see on the Internet, is a little reminder to step back and take a break. Just like me, you can master your Computer, Surf the Internet with ease, and maybe even contribute to helping others. Believe it or not, this a positive experience!

This text and what you see in front of you is a typical "Web Page". Pages like this are the building blocks of the most frequently used section of the Internet, the "World Wide Web" (hence, "www" which you have probably seen or heard in public advertisements). Web pages are used by all kinds of people to convey literally all kinds of information. All of them exist on computers that are connected through the communications infrastructure: telephone lines, radio towers, satellites, and so on. The computer you are using is connected to another computer through a phone line. You are now able to access any of the millions of pages on the World Wide Web.

The program you are using right now is called a browser. All browsers perform two basic functions. They locate web pages and interpret the language used to write them so that they can be viewed. Different browsers may interpret the same page in different ways, but the content is always virtually the same. All browsers are not like the example in design or functions, so the picture is a general idea of what your browser looks like.


The Internet Explorer Screen
Below is a diagram of a typical MS Internet Explorer screen. Each of the listed screen components will be discussed on other pages of the tutorial.

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