Browser vs Search Engine

Browsers

You are probably using a browser to read this right now. A Web browser, often just called a "browser," is the program people use to access the World Wide Web. It interprets HTML code including text, images, hypertext links, Javascript, and Java applets. After rendering the HTML code, the browser displays a nicely formatted page. Some common browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator, Mozilla FireFox, Opera, Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

Cookies

A cookie is a small text file that can be stored in only one specific directory that allows the web page to store a small amount of data about the page.   Use of cookies allows you to return to the site on the page that you last used or to rember your preferenace about that page.  The files are not executable so they can never be harmful.  Cookeis have been replaced by modern browsers but some sites still like to use them and they normally inform the user if they are making use of cookies and give the user an chance to opt out.

ActiveX

This Microsoft-based technology was built to link desktop applications to the World Wide Web. Using ActiveX development tools, software developers can create interactive Web content for their applications. For example, Word and Excel documents can be viewed directly in web browsers that support ActiveX. While ActiveX is a useful technology, the downside is that you need to have a up-to-date version ActiveX installed on your machine in order to use ActiveX-enabled content.

Adobe Flash

Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, and various web page Flash components, to integrate video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications. Flash can manipulate vector and raster graphics, and supports bidirectional streaming of audio and video. It contains a scripting language called ActionScript. Flash is dead. Due to substantial security flaws in flash it has been replaced by featured in HTML5 and removed from most web sites. Almost all versions of Android and all Apple devices do not support flash.

Search Engines

Search engines are websites which allow users to search for other websites. The most commonly used websites used in South Africa are:

• 1. Google

  2. Bing

  3. Yahoo

The sites allow you to search for keywords and phrases and returns a list of suitable webpages which match your search.