Browse the web with Microsoft Edge

- [Instructor] On your computer, your web browser is the software you need in order to access and interact with the content on the web. Most operating systems come with at least one built in web browser application. For example, Mac OS computers include the Safari browser and Windows 10 includes Microsoft Edge but there are several other browsers on the market to choose from including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. At the most basic level, all browsers allow you to access websites, download files, images, and videos on websites and so on. Browsers mainly vary in the features they include but these days most browsers have very similar features. Here we'll take a look at browsing the web with Microsoft Edge, but you'll be able to use other modern browsers in mostly the same away. I'll open up Microsoft Edge and there it is. To access a website, we enter the URL or address of the site into the address bar at the top of the window. The browser loads the webpage and it's displayed in the main part of the window. We can use the scroll bar to scroll down the page to view it and to interact with all the elements on the page. White pages usually contain hyperlinks, often just called links, that point to other pages on the website or to entirely different websites. You can often tell if text is a hyperlink by its appearance. It's usually a different color from the surrounding text like we see here, or it becomes underlined or already is underlined, or it's just visually different in some other way. Alternately, if you place your mouse over text or an image and the cursor turns into a hand with a pointing finger, that indicates the item is a clickable link. You'll also see the address that clicking the link will take you to there in the lower left hand corner and if I click that link I'll go to that page. And now we're looking at the webpage that was linked from the previous page and we can start browsing this page. If necessary, you can go back to the previous page by clicking the back button in the browser. Similarly, you can click the forward button to view that link page again. Although it's easy to move back and forth between pages like this, there are often times when you need to reference multiple webpages at the same time and going back and forth can get tedious. A solution is to use tabs which are a feature of web browsers which allow you to open multiple webpages at the same time in the same browser window. For example, maybe I'm searching for Microsoft Surface tablets, I'll click that link, and as you can see there are many different models to choose from here. Clicking one of these takes me to the page about that model and then I need to click the back button to go back to the links to look at the other models. To save time, I'm going to right click on the link and choose open link in new tab. In this particular browser, that opens a new tab here in the background and you can see the title of the page here. In some web browsers, depending on your settings, the new tab may open in the front, but in either case you can switch back and forth between tabs just by clicking on them. So now I can right click on the links for the other product versions I'm interested in and open them in new tabs as well. And once I've done that I can now switch among all the tabs to do my research. You can also open the web pages in new windows by right clicking and choosing open link in new window. Opening links in new windows can help you stay organized by grouping related tabs in their own window and opening unrelated tabs in other windows, but that's a matter of personal preference. But because these are separate windows, I can move this one slightly out of the way and still see the other window here in the background and I can switch to that if I needed to. You can always keep track of the web pages you visit by using the history feature of the browser. In Edge, click the three dot button here in the upper right hand corner and roll your mouse over history and from here I can choose manage history to see a list of the web pages I visited, organized by date. You have the option to clear web pages from your history whenever you like, which you can do by clicking clear browsing data and here I can choose to clear the browsing history from the last 24 hours, the last hour, the last seven days, the last four weeks and all of my browsing history. I'll leave that as is for now though. Again, you'll find all the features we've seen here in Microsoft Edge in other browsers as well, but they may be located in different places. But once you familiarize yourself with your preferred browser, you'll find these features make it easy to browse the web.