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You may have a favorite browser, homepage, and social network. But do you understand how all those things connect with each other and what the future holds for them? The Google Chrome team has a handy guide dubbed ’20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web.’ It’s an HTML5-based interactive book that has cute drawings and easy-to-understand writings about complex things.
You can download the PDF of the entire book right here to share it with your students, friends, and generally inquisitive friends.
Below you can a couple of my personal favorites from the book. Be sure to view the entire book at 20thingsilearned.com when you get a chance!
Thing #1: What is the Internet?
or, “You Say Tomato, I Say TCP/IP”
What is the Internet, exactly?
To some of us, the Internet is where we stay in touch with friends, get the news, shop, and play games.
To some others, the Internet can mean their local broadband providers, or the underground wires and
fiber-optic cables that carry data back and forth across cities and oceans. Who is right?
A helpful place to start is near the Very Beginning: 1974. That was the year that a few smart computer
researchers invented something called the Internet Protocol Suite, or TCP/IP for short. TCP/IP created a
set of rules that allowed computers to “talk” to each other and send information back and forth.
TCP/IP is somewhat like human communication: when we speak to each other, the rules of grammar
provide structure to language and ensures that we can understand each other and exchange ideas.
Similarly, TCP/IP provides the rules of communication that ensure interconnected devices understand
each other so that they can send information back and forth. As that group of interconnected devices
grew from one room to many rooms — and then to many buildings, and then to many cities and countries -
- the Internet was born.
The early creators of the Internet discovered that data and information could be sent more efficiently
when broken into smaller chunks, sent separately, and reassembled. Those chunks are called packets.
So when you send an email across the Internet, your full email message is broken down into packets,
sent to your recipient, and reassembled. The same thing happens when you watch a video on a website
like YouTube: the video files are segmented into data packets that can be sent from multiple YouTube
servers around the world and reassembled to form the video that you watch through your browser.
What about speed? If traffic on the Internet were akin to a stream of water, the Internet’s bandwidth is
equivalent to the amount of water that flows through the stream per second. So when you hear engineers
talking about bandwidth, what they’re really referring to is the amount of data that can be sent over your
Internet connection per second. This is an indication of how fast your connection is. Faster connections
are now possible with better physical infrastructure (such as fiber optic cables that can send information
close to the speed of light), as well as better ways to encode the information onto the physical medium
itself, even on older medium like copper wires.
The Internet is a fascinating and highly technical system, and yet for most of us today, it’s a userfriendly
world where we don’t even think about the wires and equations involved. The Internet is also the
backbone that allows the World Wide Web that we know and love to exist: with an Internet connection, we
can access an open, ever-growing universe of interlinked web pages and applications. In fact, there are
probably as many pages on the web today as there are neurons in your brain, as there are stars in the
Milky Way!
Thing #12: Browsers and Privacy
or, giving you choices to protect your privacy in the browser
Security and privacy are closely related, but not identical.
Consider the security and privacy of your home: door locks and alarms help protect you from burglars,
but curtains and blinds keep your home life private from passersby. In the same way, browser security
helps protect you from malware, phishing, and other online attacks, while privacy features help keep your
browsing private on your computer.
Let’s look more closely at privacy. Here’s an analogy: Say you’re an avid runner who jogs a few miles
every day. If you carry a GPS device to help you track your daily runs, you create a diary of running data
on your device — a historical record of where you run, how far you run, your average speed, and the
calories you burn.
As you browse the web, you generate a similar diary of browser data that is stored locally on your
computer: a history of the sites you visit, the cookies sent to your browser, and any files you download. If
you’ve asked your browser to remember your passwords or form data, that’s stored on your computer too.
Some of us may not realize that we can clear all this browser data from our computers at any time.
It’s easy to do through a browser’s Options or Preferences menu. (The menu differs from browser to
browser.) In fact, the latest versions of most modern browsers also offer a “private” or “incognito” mode.
For example, in Chrome’s incognito mode, any web page that you view won’t appear in your browsing
history. In addition, all new cookies are deleted after you close all the incognito windows that you’ve
opened. This mode is especially handy if you share your computer with other people, or if you work on a
public computer in your local library or cybercafe.
All these privacy features in the browser give you control over the browsing data locally on your computer
or specific data that are sent by your browser to websites. Your browser’s privacy settings do not control
other data that these websites may have about you, such as information you previously submitted on the
website.
There are ways to limit some of the information that websites receive when you visit them. Many browsers
let you control your privacy preferences on a site-by-site basis and make your own choices about specific
data such as cookies, JavaScript, and plugins. For instance, you can set up rules to allow cookies only for
a specified list of sites that you trust, and instruct the browser to block cookies for all other sites.
There’s always a bit of tension between privacy and efficiency. Collecting real-world aggregate data and
feedback from users can really help improve products and the user experience. The key is finding a good
balance between the two while upholding strong privacy standards.
Here’s an example from the real world: browser cookies. On one hand, with cookies, a website you
frequently visit is able to remember contents of your shopping cart, keep you logged in, and deliver a
more useful, personalized experience based on your previous visits. On the other hand, allowing browser
cookies means that the website is collecting and remembering information about these previous visits. If
you wish, you can choose to block cookies at any time. So the next time you’re curious about fine-tuning
your browser privacy settings, check out the privacy settings in your browser’s Options or Preferences
menu.
You can download the PDF of the entire book right here to share it with your students, friends, and generally inquisitive friends.
Be sure to view the entire book at 20thingsilearned.com when you get a chance!
