4th Form ICT

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4th Form ICT: lesson 7

Lesson 7  Browsers

In this lesson you will explore a little the history of the web browser and be introduced to different browsers. Many of you may already know a lot about this: there will be plenty of opportunity to discuss and share your knowledge.

The focus will be on IE and Firefox, but we start by looking at their predecessors.

1)  Spend 10–15 minutes exploring older browsers via the Browser Emulator at http://www.dejavu.org/emulator.htm. Discussion will follow. (If time, or for prep, you may be asked to explore the timeline at http://www.dejavu.org/forsta.htm — by the same people as produced the browser emulator.)

2)  How does IE6 compare with Firefox? Some things you'll be asked to think about and explore:

Tabbed browsing. You'll be asked to have a look at these (silent) tutorials:
Session restore. You'll be talked through the options set out at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Session_Restore. You can install a specialist Session Manager (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2324).

Firefox add-ons (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/). There are some good (silent) tutorials on these:
(A full set of all these tutorials is available online here.)
What's being shown here is relevant for your devices at home and will come into play for your mobile devices, too (in time). At school, you cannot (currently) install add-ons, but there are other ways to save a browser session which you can use - and we'll show you these soon.

Prep: in addition to any ideas above,
  • Find out about (and install, at home) Opera and Safari (for Windows/Mac): what do you like/dislike about each?
  • Does your phone have a web browser?  Research Opera's products for mobile devices.
  • What other ways do you know of reading the web on your mobile phone? Find out about how accessing a page through Google works on a mobile device.

All for discussion next time.