What is the meaning of browsing the Internet?
Browsing the Internet simply means, moving from one web page to another on the internet by the use of a computer or a smartphone. The computer or smartphone can only help you browse the Internet with the aid of a web browser application. A web browser application also known as browser app is an application software that is installed on a computer or smartphone and used to open webpages. Some popular examples of a web browser app are; Google chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, UC browser, Microsoft edge, etc.
What are webpages?
Webpages are virtual pages on the internet that contain information in the form of texts, images or videos. These pages are what come together to form a website.
What are hyperlinks?
Hyperlinks are texts, images or symbols that links to a webpage or a document. Hyperlinks help Internet users to browse through webpages on the internet faster and easier without having to type the URL of every single webpage they want to visit.
Hyperlinks are simply called links because of the function they offer as the link between webpages or documents. A text or image that contains hyperlink is usually highlighted or has a different color from the other texts around it. For example, if you click on “theictbook“, it will take you to the homepage of this website because the text contains a hyperlink which is linking it to the homepage of this website. Hyperlinks keep webpages especially the homepage clean and simple because the URLs of other webpages do not have to appear on it but rather, simple hypertexts like ‘Home’, ‘Contact’, ‘Services’ and ‘About’ are what appears on the homepage. To visit the Home page, Contact page, Services page and About page you just have to click on their respective hypertexts.
When you are using a mouse pointer, hovering over a hypertext or hypermedia will either change its color, zoom in or out or show any other modification based on the website’s customization and sometimes it does not change at all. But on most web pages, it is the cursor that changes. That is one of the easiest ways to identify hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are on almost all webpages on the internet which suggests that, without hyperlinks browsing would have been very difficult and more complicated.
Managing web pages in a browser
Browser apps are built to allow the use of multiple tabs during browsing. It therefore gives the user the opportunity to browse different web pages at the same time. For example, you can open awaycande.com, theictbook.com and afobu.com at the same time on different tabs in the same browser. This means that, when you open a website or webpage and you don’t want to close it but still want to open a different website or webpage, you can do so by adding another tab and entering the address of the website or webpage you want to open.
Saving links to web pages you want to revisit later is another great way to save time. Provided you visited a web page that has so much good and useful information that you would like to revisit later and read more, you can bookmark it or mark it as favorite which will make it easier for you to find and revisit because there is no need to type the address of the web page again.
To bookmark a web page in Google chrome, locate and tap or click on the three vertically arranged dots in the top right corner of the browser. Now, tap or click on the star icon to bookmark the web page.
To open the web page from your bookmarks, open the browser and tap or click on the three dots in the top right corner of the browser. Tap or click on ‘Bookmarks’ from the menu that appears then tap or click on the link you bookmarked to open the web page.
You can also revisit a web page from the History menu of the browser. The web browser keeps a record of all recently visited web pages which can be found from the History menu. To open a link from the History menu, tap on the three dots in the top right corner of the browser. Tap on ‘History’ from the drop-down menu. A list of links to the recently opened web pages will appear, tap on the one you want to open and the web page will open.
Types of hyperlink
- Text hyperlink; This kind of hyperlink uses a word or group of texts to link to another webpage or document.
- Image hyperlink; This hyperlink uses an image to link to another webpage or document.
- Bookmark hyperlink; This uses both text and image to link to a webpage or document.
