A brief introduction to the World Wide Web using Netscape

Netscape is a program that enables you to find information by visiting electronic sites all over the world.

Warning to outsiders: some of these instructions apply only to the Math Labs at CSUSB.

Starting and stopping.

If you got here, you managed to start Netscape: either double-click on the Netscape icon, or type netscape at a command prompt.

To quit Netscape, pull down the File menu and choose Exit or Quit.

How to get around.

Links. If you see a phrase that is underlined (and it's usually blue) or a picture that is outlined, you can click (once) on it to go to the site it refers to. Sometimes a picture will have different places you can click to go to different places.
URLs (Open Location). An URL (Universal Resource Locator) is a World Wide Web address. If you know the URL of a location you can type it in a window you get by

choosing Open Location on the File menu or
typing in the Location window. If you don't have Location window, choose Show Location on the Options menu.

Here's a typical URL:

http://www.math.csusb.edu/classes

Buttons: Forward, Back, Home. Home is the page that you first see when you start Netscape. (On the Math Dept. computers, it's the Math Dept. Home Page.) If you have visited several sites, Back will take you to the previous site. Once you've been Back, you can retrace your steps with Forward. You can also find these on the Go menu.
Bookmarks. If you found a site you would like to return to, add a bookmark using the Bookmark menu. From this menu you can also go to any of the bookmarks you have saved.
Searching. The Directory menu has several ways to search for specific topics.

Internet Search has links to several different search engines: programs that search the whole World Wide Web for topics. Unfortunately, searching is somewhat of an art form: if you just type in a likely topic, you may come up with no "hits" or millions of "hits". If the first service that Netscape provides you isn't to your liking, go farther down on the page and try a different one.
You can also look through subjects arranged like an index to find your topic. These are called Web Guides. If you come up with too long a list by the first method, try one of these.

External viewers.

Netscape can't handle all types of things (some pictures, movies, sounds), so it starts up "helper programs", called external viewers. IMPORTANT: Pictures tie up a lot of temporary storage space. As soon as you are finished looking at the picture, quit the viewer program by pulling down a menu from the triangle box in the upper left of the viewer window and releasing on Quit. Just closing is not good enough. If you have too many pictures on your workstation, the screen will freeze up and you will get upset.

Other features.

Progress reports. At the bottom of the window, the program prints messages that help you monitor its progress. If it's taking too long to load the page, you can give up by clicking the Stop button.

Sliders. If the page you are on is longer or wider than the window, the bars at the right and bottom of the window let you see other parts ofthe page.

Options: configuring Netscape. The Options menu lets you customize the program. One useful thing is to tell it your e-mail address, so that when you find a MailTo: link on a page, you don't have to start up your mail program to send a message. You can also change the way the Netscape window looks.