1.1 How to use a hypertext browser

The two most popular browser programs, Netscape and NCSA Mosaic, work in very similar ways. Basically, you click where you want to go, and use the scrollbar to read long pages. The browser remembers a "history stack" of the last few pages which you visited, and you can think of the most recently loaded page as sitting on top of this stack. Every time you click a link within a page, you add a new page to the top of the stack.

One important thing to remember is that if you hit an error screen, like this one, the quickest way to recover is to click on the Back button. (In Netscape, it looks like: ).

To get help from the browser itself, find the Help menu, near the top right corner of the window. In Netscape, select Handbook from the dropdown menu (or just press the Handbook button just above the viewing area); in Mosaic, select Manual.... This loads the online manual for your browser, over the Internet. Use the Home key to return to this Lab documentation.

Keith Orpen, who is still writing this, would like to hear your comments and suggestions.