Web page practice: a pretend browser to learn in

The parts of a browser

• A browser is the program that shows web pages. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari are browsers. They do not look quite alike, but the parts below are in all of them.
• A tab is one page kept open. Tabs usually sit in a row along the top, each with the name of its page. A click on a tab shows that page; the others stay open behind it. The + opens a new tab, and the × on a tab closes that tab and nothing else.
• The Back button, an arrow pointing left, goes to the page you were on just before. Forward, the arrow pointing right, undoes a Back. Reload, an arrow in a circle, asks the site for the same page again; words typed into a page but not yet sent may be lost when it does.
• The address bar is the long box at the top. It shows the address of the page you are on. Typing an address there and pressing Enter goes to that page. In many browsers, typing words that are not an address makes a web search for those words instead.
• The name of the site is the first part of the address, up to the first single slash. In library.example/hours the site is library.example, and /hours is one page of it. A page can be made to look like any site; the address bar is where the name of the site it really is shows.
• A link is a thing on a page that takes you to another page when you click it. Links in a line of words are often underlined or in another color. A button, a picture or a line in a menu can be a link too. Over a link, the pointer often turns into a small hand.
• The Menu button is often three short lines, one above the other. On a narrow screen many sites fold their links away behind it, and a click on it opens the list.
• A search box on a page usually looks through that one site, not the whole web. It is often marked with a small magnifying glass.
• A box that comes up over a page is part of that page, whatever it says. Many have an × in a corner, or a button such as “Close” or “No thanks”. Closing the tab closes the page and its boxes with it.
• On a phone the same parts are there in other places: in many phone browsers the tabs are behind a small square with a number in it, and the address bar may be at the bottom of the screen.

How the lessons work

• The pretend browser is the light-colored box. The row at its top is the tabs; under it are Back, Forward, Reload and the address bar; the rest is the pretend page.
• The pretend site is a library that does not exist. Its address ends in .example, a name set aside for examples, which no real site has.
• Only the step at hand answers. The step is written above the pretend browser. If something else is clicked or typed, the page says what it was, and the pretend browser stays as it was. Nothing can be broken.
• Typing an address is forgiving here: capital letters, spaces, and https:// or www. at the front do not matter. A real browser is forgiving about some of these and not others.
• Lesson 5 has a longer page, with 14 lines of pretend news, so there is a bottom to go down to. Lesson 6 folds the links behind a Menu button, as sites do on a narrow screen. Lesson 8 brings up three kinds of box, one after another.
• The page waits. There is no countdown, and taking a long time costs nothing. At the end it says how long the lesson took, from the first time the pointer went into the pretend browser, and how many times something else was clicked or typed.
• “Start this lesson again” picks other links to ask for.

Every time the page is built, a program makes 18,000 lessons and walks through their 70,000 steps in a pretend browser of its own, written apart from this page’s: that the thing each step asks for is on the screen when it is asked for, that using it changes something, that the step is said in full in both languages, and that nothing but the step’s own thing answers.

What this page does not do

• It is not a real browser. It knows the few pretend pages of one pretend site and nothing else, and no address typed into it goes anywhere.
• It does not look like your browser in every detail. Where the buttons sit, their shapes and their colors differ from one browser to the next and from year to year.
• It does not teach signing in, passwords, email, downloading or saving files, bookmarks, or filling in a real form.
• It does not teach how to tell a scam from a real page beyond the one line about the address bar above. Scam check is our page for that.
• It is not practice for the hand: Mouse and trackpad practice and Typing practice are.
• It does not keep your times or which lessons you have done, gives no certificate and makes no promise about how fast anyone will learn.
• It can be worked by keyboard (Tab, Enter and the space bar), but it has not been tried with a screen reader, a switch or an eye tracker.