Now that we’ve got some understanding about what the internet is and isn’t, let’s talk about this thing we call a browser. Because your computer needs to be told what to do, it can’t do anything meaningful on the internet unless you tell it what you want. For example, if you want to look at a web page, you need some way to tell your computer what to ask for. How do you do this? For many of you, you simply click on the blue "e" on your desktop and type in the address of the webpage you want to visit, or click on a bookmark link.

But what many people don’t realize, is that the blue "e" is not the internet, it’s just a program on your computer. It’s a "browser", a program that does one thing. It shows you websites, one page at a time when you ask for them by typing in addresses or clicking on links. It’s called "Internet Explorer" and it’s made by Microsoft. Some of you probably didn’t even realize that you could choose which program you want to use to look at webpages, and that’s why many people’s computers have been badly infected by viruses and spyware.

You see, not all browsers (programs that can show you websites) are made the same. Internet Explorer in particular has had very many weak spots that allowed people to write websites that could do nasty things to your computer when you visited their site. And since most people used Internet Explorer, many, many computers became compromised.

The good news is that you don’t have to use Internet Explorer if you don’t want. There are several free alternatives. I’ve listed them below. My favorite out of the bunch is Firefox.

• Firefox - www.getfirefox.com
• Opera - www.opera.com
• Safari - www.apple.com/downloads

Toolbars

One way that computers get infected with spyware is when people install add-on toolbars to their browser. Often these toolbars put programs on your computer that track what you do on the internet and send it back to marketing companies. In addition, every toolbar you install has the potential to slow down your browser. I’ve seen cases where someone had literally installed 5 or 6 add-on toolbars for Internet Explorer. There are so many things that these companies promise, but there’s one simple rule that you can follow that will keep your browser safe.

Don’t ever install toolbars.

Conclusion

Hopefully you have a better idea exactly what a "browser" is after reading this. It’s just a special kind of program for showing websites. And there’s more than one browser that you can use. Internet Explorer is not the only one, and it has many weak spots that people can take advantage of, so I recommend switching to Firefox.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 3:40 pm and is filed under What Is The Internet?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.