Browsing and searching the Web

- [Instructor] There are lots of applications that come pre-loaded in Mac OS. In this chapter, I want to focus on Safari, which is the web browser that comes with Mac OS. A web browser is the application that you use when you visit websites on the Internet. There are other browsers you can use, like Chrome and Firefox, but Safari is the one that comes bundled with a Macintosh computer, so it's worth getting familiar with. So let's start by launching Safari. I'm going to click on the icon in the dock. It launches that application, and of course, a window opens. Now, what I see here might look different from what you see on your computer.

In fact, it actually looks a little different from what I've seen when I've opened Safari in other movies in this course. That's because I wanted to start this chapter with a clean setup. So I went and I reset all of the settings in Safari to how it would look on a brand new computer that has not yet been configured. Now, later in this chapter, we will see how you can change what page is visible here by default when you launch the application. So let's get familiar with the interface. Generally, this big, open part of the window is where you'll see a web page that you've navigated to on the Internet.

Now, in my case, I'm just going to choose one of these favorites here, and it's going to load up that page. So this is typically what you would see. You navigate to a web page, and you can see the content of that page here. And then, there's a very thin bar up across the top of the window. And we've got some important controls here. I want to start with this field in the middle. This is the address and search field. And if I click on that, I can see the address to the page that I'm looking at here. Think about in the real world. If you go anywhere, a friend's house, a business, a restaurant, every place you go to has a street address.

And it's the same on the Internet. If you want to go to a web page, you need to go to the address for that web page. And I can see the address for this page here. Now, let's navigate to another web page. And you can do that by clicking on the Address field, hitting the Delete key to clear whatever is there, and then typing in the address for the page you want to visit. So, if you know the address, you can type it in here. And a web page address will typically look something like this. I'm going to type in www.amazon.com. This is a pretty popular shopping website.

So this is a pretty normal structure. A lot of web pages begin with www, then a dot, then some key word or name, and then it will end with .com, or .org, or .edu, or something like that. Now, a lot of addresses will continue after that. There will be more text after that. But generally, it begins with something like this. Now, a lot of web pages that you'll visit will begin with www. So many, in fact, that if you actually type in the address without the www, the computer will assume that's the beginning.

So, if your address starts with www, you can feel free to not type that part. You can just type in what I typed in here, amazon.com, or whatever you're trying to visit. So from here, I can press Return, and it will load that web page because it found that address and it found the web page associated with that address. So, if you know the address for the web page you want to visit, you can type it in here. But you may not know the address for the page you want to visit, or you may not even know what pages might exist.

So what you want to do in that case is perform a search. So I'm going to click on this field again, and again, I'll hit Delete. And if you type anything into this field that does not conform to the standard structure of a web page address that we just saw, it will assume it's not an address and it will perform a search. So let's say I want some information on Sherlock Holmes. Well, I can type that in here. I'll type in Sherlock Holmes, then I'll press the Return key. That is not a website address.

So instead, it performs a search on Google. Google is a search tool, or a search engine on the web, that will help you find things. So now, I can see a bunch of links to different pages that come from this search. Now, if you see some text that is blue, usually that's something you can click on. But if you take a look at my mouse cursor right now, it looks like an arrow, if I point at this text, you'll see it changes to this pointing finger. And in that case, you know that it's something you can click on.

So, as you're browsing the web, it's pretty typical to find a link, you click on it, and it loads a web page. Now in this case, I can click on the Address field, and I can see the address for the page that I landed on. And from here, I can see there are a bunch of other links. So, if I click on one of these other links, it will load the next page, and so on. Okay, so that's what you're going to do to go to a specific address, or perform a search. As you're browsing the web, there are some valuable controls up here on the toolbar, over on the left.

If I hit this arrow pointing to the left, it will take me back to the previous page I was looking at. And now, I can click on the arrow pointing to the right, and it takes me forward to the page I was on before I took a step back. So now you can see, this one pointing to the right is no longer available because there's no longer anything forward in this chain. So as you're browsing, you might want to use these Back and Forward buttons. Then, there is this Sidebar button. If I click on that, it opens up this sidebar here, and this is where you can access Favorites and the Reading List, and we're going to see those later in this chapter.

So for now, I'm just going to hit this button again to close that sidebar. Now, another thing you can use in Safari are tabs. And tabs are something that we saw earlier in this course, but it's worth looking at here because they are very useful in Safari. I can go into the File menu, and I can hit New Tab, and now I have two separate tabs. I can click on this tab here to go to the page that I had open. I can click on this tab, and I can navigate to another page. I could go to the File menu, and hit New Tab again, and now I have three tabs. So you can navigate to multiple web pages within one window.

Now, I'm going to close two of these tabs. Just point at it and hit the little x. Point at this one, and hit the x. Another way to open a tab, and what I use most often, is by doing something specific to a link here on a page. So if I see a link that I want to load, I can right click it, or hold the Control key on my keyboard, and click on it. And it'll open up this menu. And there's an option here that says Open Link in New Tab. So now, I still have the page that I was looking at, and then in a new tab, it opened up that other page that I opened.

So I can have multiple pages open, and jump back and forth between them. And so, the last thing I want to see, as far as the general interface, is that Safari works very well as a full screen app. If I click on the green button up here in the top left, it will flip this into the full screen mode. Everything else gets off of the screen, and I can really focus on Safari. If I want to get out of full screen mode, I point my mouse cursor up at the top of the screen. The menus will appear, as well as the red and green buttons. I hit the green button, and it takes me out of full screen mode.

Okay, so we're off to a good start with Safari. What we've seen here in this movie should be all you need for normal, every day web browsing. The rest of this chapter will get into more specific features in Safari.