20 Things I Learned

Today’s web is a colorful, visual, practical, nutty, busy, friend-filled, fun and incredibly useful place. Many of us now live a life of cloud computing on the Internet: we read the news, watch movies, chat with friends, and do our daily tasks online with web-based applications right the browser. Web apps let us do that from anywhere in the world, even if we left our laptops at home. […]

Open-source software plays a big role in many parts of the web, including today’s web browsers. The release of the open-source browser Mozilla Firefox paved the way for many exciting new browser innovations. Google Chrome was built with some components from Mozilla Firefox and with the open-source rendering engine WebKit, among others. In the same spirit, the code for Chrome was made open source so that the global web community could use Chrome’s innovations in their own products, or even improve on the original Chrome source code. […]

Looking ahead, the <video> tag in HTML5 makes it easy for videos to be embedded and played in web pages. Google is also collaborating with the web community on WebM, an effort to build out a free, open-source video format that adapts to the computing power and bandwidth conditions on the web, so quality video can be delivered to a computer in a farm house in Nebraska or a smartphone in Nairobi.</video> […]

Some websites have an extended validation certificate that allows you to determine the name of the organization that runs the web site. The extended validation certificate gives you the information you need to help ensure that you’re not entrusting your information to a fake website. […]

An IP address is a series of numbers that tells us where a particular device is on the Internet network, be it the google.com server or your computer. It’s a bit like mom’s phone number: just as the phone number tells an operator which house to route a call to so it reaches your mom, an IP address tells your computer which other device on the Internet to communicate with — to send data to and get data from. […]

A Uniform Resource Locator — better known as a URL — may sound like a complicated thing. But fret not: it’s simply the web address you type into your browser to get to a particular web page or web application. When you enter a URL, the website is fetched from its hosting server somewhere in the world, transported over miles of cables to your local Internet connection, and finally displayed by the browser on your computer. […]

You can be exposed to attackers through a malicious fake website, or even through a familiar website that has been hacked. Most modern browsers pre-check each web page you visit and alert you if one is suspected of being malicious. This lets you make an informed judgment about whether you really want to visit that page. […]

Phishing takes place when someone masquerades as someone else, often with a fake website, to trick you into sharing personal information. (It’s called “phishing” because the bad guys throw out electronic bait and wait for someone to bite.) In a typical phishing scam, the attacker sends an email that looks like it’s from a bank or familiar web service you use. The subject line might say, “Please update your information at your bank!” The email contains phishing links that look like they go to your bank’s website, but really take you to an impostor website. There you’re asked to log in, and inadvertently reveal your bank account number, credit card numbers, passwords, or other sensitive information to the bad guys. […]

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. […]

A cookie is a small piece of text sent to your browser by a website you visit. It contains information about your visit that you may want the site to remember, like your preferred language and other settings. The browser stores this data and pulls it out the next time you visit the site to make the next trip easier and more personalized. If you visit a movie website and indicate that you’re most interested in comedies, for instance, the cookies sent by the website can remember this so you may see comedies displayed at the start of your next visit. […]