Chapter 1 Summary
In my overview of Chapter 1 it really gave me some new insights on something I use every single day, a web browser. Who knew a web browser could have so many darn features, because I didn’t! I use the internet and a web browser literally 50+ times a day and I still wasn’t aware of all of the features available on a web browser and how they all work and run things differently. One of the most notable things that I saw was that HTTP and HTTPS are not the same thing, and that most if not all websites now use HTTPS. Not only does it house the server for the website, it indicates a secure website connection. Web browsers help protect its users from unsafe connections by blocking them and giving a prompt warning it could be dangerous and if you still want to continue onto the site.
I go to various different websites daily, every single day at any time. A new piece of information that I learned was that cookies and data that browsers store are what loads up a website faster. This is because whatever website you're using saves small but important information that was input the last time it was used, to load up the page again faster, instead of having to load up a brand new copy of it every single time. Cookies/cache can include usernames and passwords, credit card information, even down the items left in your shopping cart. Something else that was interesting to me was that when you print a webpage, instead of wondering what it’s gonna look like before you print, the print preview window literally shows you what will print and what it’s going to look like. I have spent so much time in the past pressing CTRL+ to zoom in the page thinking it will print bigger, but instead it prints out a big zoomed in image and I’m left confused. But all you really have to do is scroll on the page where you want and it will print out clean and clear.
I use OperaGX as my main everyday browser so learning all of the different types of features on other web browsers was very shocking to me. I have used Firefox and Chrome in the past but never really dived into any of the extensions to see what they could do for me and make my browsing experience more smooth. Even using my regular browser I am still pretty unsure about what types of features there are but I definitely think I am going to dive deeper into some of them to see if I can enhance my daily internet use in any sort of way.