Chapter 26: Browsing the World Wide Web with Internet Explorer

Along with e-mail, the World Wide Web is the main reason most people bother with the Internet, and it is one of the most important reasons that people have home computers at all. Windows Vista includes Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7), the latest version of the world's most popular web browser.

This chapter explains some of the basic concepts of the World Wide Web and describes how to set up Internet Explorer and configure it according to your tastes. It then explains how to use Internet Explorer to browse web pages, search for new web sites, and remember your favorite sites, and how to use IE 7 ² s new phishing and RSS features. We also explain how to tell Internet Explorer to fill in web forms automatically, how to set colors and set your start page, and how to control privacy settings.

What Is the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web (usually just referred to as "the Web") is a collection of millions of files stored on thousands of computers (called web servers) all over the world. These files represent text documents, pictures, video, sounds, programs, interactive environments, and just about any other kind of information that has ever been recorded in computer files. It is probably the largest and most diverse collection of information ever assembled .

What unites these files is a system for linking one file to another and transmitting them across the Internet. HTML codes allow a file to contain links to related files (see the next section, "What Is HTML?") Such a link (also called a hyperlink} contains the information necessary to locate the related file on the Internet. When you connect to the Internet and use a web browser program like Internet Explorer, you can read, view, hear, or otherwise interact with the Web without paying attention to whether the information you are accessing is stored on a computer down the hall or on the other side of the world. A news story stored on a computer in Singapore can link you to a stock quote stored in New York, a picture stored in Frankfurt, and an audio file stored in Tokyo. The combination of the web servers, the Internet, and your web browser assembles this information seamlessly and presents it to you as a unified whole. This system of interlinked text, called hypertext , was first described in the 1960s by Theodor H. Nelson, but it took 30 years for it to be widely used in the form of the World Wide Web, which was invented in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, a particle physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland.

By following links, you can get from almost any web document to almost any other web document. For this reason, some people like to think of the entire Web as being one big document. In this view, the links just take you from one part of the document to another.

An intranet is an internal network that uses the same communication protocols as the Internet, but is limited to a specific group , usually the employees in one company. Some organizations create private versions of the Web on their intranets so that access to their web pages is limited to employees of that organization.