How To Use The Internet : Parts of the Web Browser

When you open up your web browser, the first thing you will notice there are many different parts to it. We’ll start at the top here and look at the Address bar. The Address bar is where you would type the exact address of the website you want to go to. Now, the Address bar is not the same as the Search bar. In the Address bar is where you only would type in exact address. Over here in the Search bar, we can type any words you want and Google will come back with search results. So for instance, if you knew you’d exactly want to go to let’s say, homesteadhomeschool.com. So if you know the exact address of the website you wanted to go to, you type it here in the Address bar. What the web browser does is it adds in this http://. If you want it to, you could type that in but most browsers nowadays will add that in for you. So, you only have to type in the web address and hit Enter on the keyboard. And the web browser will add in this part for you. And in fact, you don’t even have to put the www. I will show you that. So let’s go back Home. So I am going to press the Home button here and we’ll just type in homesteadhomeschool.com. So you can see, you don’t even need the www and the web browser adds in the http for you but at the end here, you will see—you always need to do the .com or the .net or the dot whatever. So whatever the dot is; the .com or .net or whatever the ending part is, you always have to type that. But the www or the http://, you don’t have to type that. Now coming back over here to the left, we see the Back and Forward buttons. While we’re using the internet, if we go through lots of different websites, if you want to back, you hit the Back button and if you want to go forward, you hit the Forward button. This is the Refresh button. Sometimes, if there’s an update of information on the website or something has changed or maybe you’re having a problem with the website, hitting the Refresh button refreshes the view of the website you’re looking at. So it basically reloads the website. The little X is the Stop button. If the website you’re on is doing something you don’t want to do or you’re having some sort of a problem with the website you’re on, you can hit the little X button and stop everything that the web browser is doing. Next is the Home button. You press the Home button to bring you back to your homepage. You can set your homepage to wherever you want. Right now, my homepage is set to Google. I will show you how to change your homepage in a minute. This part of the web browser is called the Viewer. Whatever website you’re looking at will appear in the Viewer. As you can see, the Google homepage is very simple and there’s not a lot of stuff on here but what if we’re looking at a website with a few more things on it. If we notice in the Viewer here, there is more to the website below. So, over here this little scroll bar appears. So if we want to go down and see what’s lower on the page, we bring the mouse over, click on the little scroll wheel and we can drag it down and see all the stuff that is on the webpage we’re looking at. An even easier way t do it is just to make sure that the mouse is anywhere in the Viewer and then use the little scroll wheel in the middle of the mouse to scroll down. That little scroll wheel really makes it easy to scroll up and down on the webpage.