In addition to small, delicious desserts, if someone's talking about cookies, they could mean internet cookies. It's very common for even web-savvy people to be slightly confused about what cookies do and what they're for. Some people have come to fear internet cookies, deleting them every chance they get.
So what exactly is a cookie as it relates to the internet? In the simplest of terms, when your computer visits a webpage, the webpages gives your computer a cookie, which it stores on your hard drive. When your computer visits that webpage again, it shows the website the cookie, and the webpage "recognizes" you. Think of it as a small badge or ID card the website reads.
If you've ever visited a website twice, and it's remembered your log in information or your automatically logged you in that's because of a cookie. When I log in to my Google account, it automatically knows my account, password, name, preferences, and lots of other things. That's because I have a cookie on my computer that has this information on it. A cookie is simply a small text file like "ID=JaneSmith Password=2Cute4You!"
A lot of people think that cookies can let viruses in to their computers, or let hackers get their personal information, but that's not true. A cookie saved on your computer is the same as any other text document with words on it. The worst thing a cookie can do is go bad.
If you have a technology question you'd like answered, comment on this post or send me an email. Reader submitted questions are the best ones!
Practical Tip of the Day:
If your web browser is acting slow or funny, you can try deleting your cookies. Sometimes something happens to internet cookies and they just "go bad". All web browsers have options for deleting cookies, usually in the settings. Once you delete your cookies, you'll notice you'll need to log in again to all the websites that normally remembered you, and maybe fill in forms by hand again. (Some website cookies remember things like your home address if you enter it into a form on the page.)
Showing posts with label web browser. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web browser. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Which Web Browser Should I Use?
Uh oh. I can already feel the scrutinizing eyes upon me! People nowadays are so attached to their web browser of choice that some will argue their point more heatedly about this topic than their political views. For some, their choice of web browser IS a political view, but I'm getting ahead of myself. First of all, what is a web browser?
If you read my article about "What is the Internet?" you may alread be familiar with the term "web browser" as I briefly mentioned them in the PTD (Practical Tip of the Day). In short, a web browser is the program in your computer (or any other electronic device that lets you surf the web) that communicates with the Internet.
Some of the most popular web browsers used right now are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. These four programs are all made by different companies and all do the same thing only slightly differently. When asked which web browser is "the best" I usually draw similarities between web browsers and cars. If you have four sedans lined up, and had a dozen people test them all, it would be unlikely that all twelve would pick the same car as "the best." Personal preference comes into play just as much with web browsers as it does cars.
For some, they want the fastest. Others, the safest. Still others prefer ease of use or maybe they just want to stick with what they've always used. I'm not going to go into which web browser wins in these individual catagories because A) Web browsers are upgraded so frequently that my information would become out of date very quickly and B) Some of these catagories are very difficult to quantify so it's difficult to rate. What I might consider a difficult browser to understand might be simple to someone else or vice versa for example.
Fortunately, if you do want to "shop around" for web browsers there are a plethora of people who do do reviews and rate them. A simple google search for "web browser reviews" should give you plenty of resources. The other nice thing is that most web browsers are available for download for free so you can try them out without paying anything. What do you have to loose? Read around, try them out, and you'll be sure to find one that works perfect for you!
Practical Tip of the Day:
Most web browsers have two areas to type things in towards the top of the window. One is called the "URL field" (don't worry about what URL stands for right now), and the other is the "search field". If you know exactly what webpage you want to go to, you will type in it's name into the (generally longer) URL field. This is where you'd type an address typically starting with "www". If you don't know exactly where you want to go, or you need to find the answer to a question, you'd type it into the search field. Think of this as the yellow/white pages of the Internet. It'll show you all the webpages it finds that match what you typed into the search field.
If you read my article about "What is the Internet?" you may alread be familiar with the term "web browser" as I briefly mentioned them in the PTD (Practical Tip of the Day). In short, a web browser is the program in your computer (or any other electronic device that lets you surf the web) that communicates with the Internet.
Some of the most popular web browsers used right now are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. These four programs are all made by different companies and all do the same thing only slightly differently. When asked which web browser is "the best" I usually draw similarities between web browsers and cars. If you have four sedans lined up, and had a dozen people test them all, it would be unlikely that all twelve would pick the same car as "the best." Personal preference comes into play just as much with web browsers as it does cars.
For some, they want the fastest. Others, the safest. Still others prefer ease of use or maybe they just want to stick with what they've always used. I'm not going to go into which web browser wins in these individual catagories because A) Web browsers are upgraded so frequently that my information would become out of date very quickly and B) Some of these catagories are very difficult to quantify so it's difficult to rate. What I might consider a difficult browser to understand might be simple to someone else or vice versa for example.
Fortunately, if you do want to "shop around" for web browsers there are a plethora of people who do do reviews and rate them. A simple google search for "web browser reviews" should give you plenty of resources. The other nice thing is that most web browsers are available for download for free so you can try them out without paying anything. What do you have to loose? Read around, try them out, and you'll be sure to find one that works perfect for you!
Practical Tip of the Day:
Most web browsers have two areas to type things in towards the top of the window. One is called the "URL field" (don't worry about what URL stands for right now), and the other is the "search field". If you know exactly what webpage you want to go to, you will type in it's name into the (generally longer) URL field. This is where you'd type an address typically starting with "www". If you don't know exactly where you want to go, or you need to find the answer to a question, you'd type it into the search field. Think of this as the yellow/white pages of the Internet. It'll show you all the webpages it finds that match what you typed into the search field.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
What is the Internet?
Last week I had a special edition about SOPA, which mainly affects the Internet. Now, that was a by-popular-demand topic, but I thought we should start small for those of us who aren't so tech savvy. After all, it's hard to care about the politics involved with a topic if you don't understand the topic, right?
The word "internet" basically means "interconnected networks", but that doesn't really help too much does it? The way I usually explain the Internet to people is by visualization. You know me. I know my mother. My mother knows her friend Debbie. Debbie knows her mechanic Bob.We've now drawn a line from you to a car mechanic in South Florida. Now, let's say that instead of each of us knowing just one person, we know all the people we actually know, including coworkers, old classmates, neighbors, family, friends, etc. There's probably a lot of overlap of people-who-know-people-we-both-know now. We often know so many people we often classify them as our different "networks" of people, right?
The Internet is very much like that visualization. It's a collection of computers and computers-linked-to-computers (aka networks) that spans over the entire world- not so different than the telephone lines we're all familiar with. The only difference is that instead of carrying just audio, the internet can carrying those magical ones and zeros we talked about before that can turn into pictures, videos, audio, pages on a screen or anything else. It's a bit overwhelming, isn't it?
Practical Tip of the Day:
The icon you click on to get to the Internet is called your "web browser". There are lots of different web browsers out there, and while they all do the same basic thing, they all do it a little differently- just like different models of cars. So if someone ever asks what web browser (or sometimes simply called "browser") you use, you can now look at the icon and know exactly what they're talking about!
The word "internet" basically means "interconnected networks", but that doesn't really help too much does it? The way I usually explain the Internet to people is by visualization. You know me. I know my mother. My mother knows her friend Debbie. Debbie knows her mechanic Bob.We've now drawn a line from you to a car mechanic in South Florida. Now, let's say that instead of each of us knowing just one person, we know all the people we actually know, including coworkers, old classmates, neighbors, family, friends, etc. There's probably a lot of overlap of people-who-know-people-we-both-know now. We often know so many people we often classify them as our different "networks" of people, right?
The Internet is very much like that visualization. It's a collection of computers and computers-linked-to-computers (aka networks) that spans over the entire world- not so different than the telephone lines we're all familiar with. The only difference is that instead of carrying just audio, the internet can carrying those magical ones and zeros we talked about before that can turn into pictures, videos, audio, pages on a screen or anything else. It's a bit overwhelming, isn't it?
Practical Tip of the Day:
The icon you click on to get to the Internet is called your "web browser". There are lots of different web browsers out there, and while they all do the same basic thing, they all do it a little differently- just like different models of cars. So if someone ever asks what web browser (or sometimes simply called "browser") you use, you can now look at the icon and know exactly what they're talking about!
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