All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to
another great episode here at ITProTV. I'm your host Don Pezet. And we are continuing on with our
CompTia IT Fundamental Series. In this episode, we're gonna be looking
at what is probably the most important application that users make use of today,
which is the web browser. And so many services are available via
the web that is really what people, when people think of the internet,
they think of the web. And the tool we use to access
that is the web browser. And to guide us through
some of the settings and things that we can do on a standard
web browser, we've got Mr. Ronnie Wong right here
in the studio with us. So Ronnie, thanks for joining us. Well, Don, thank you again for being with me as we continue on through
our IT Fundamentals journey here. We're taking a look at this idea of
the web browser and most of the time, as far as people that are just taking
a look at it from a computer standpoint. Yeah, they’re just using it to browse
around on the Internet to do other things, to just connect and take a look. Buy, shop, I think is kind
of a big one that you have. But there’s other settings in the browser
itself that we can use to help us to control some of the content,
as well as to adjust it for more security. And then, of course, well, sometimes it actually stores more
information than we want it to. We want to take a look at some of
these different settings that we can manipulate and change and make it
a little bit more effective for us too. So that's what we want to do and we wanna at least show you a few
of these options to help us out. To ensure that we cover quite a bit
of different scenarios that you might actually go, like, I need to do this,
or I need to do this in the web browser. How do I go about doing that? All right, well, Ronnie, most people just
fire up a web browser and they never really customize
settings on it at all, right? If I have Internet Explorer,
Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox,
I mean, the list goes on and on. They kinda just work out of the box Right. Right. So if I want to change that behavior, I guess let's start with
something a little basic here. Which is, why wouldn't I want just all the
default settings to come on one of these browsers. Well there's a couple of reasons why. One of course is depending on who
actually produced the browser. They might actually have some
settings that are on there that store a lot of information for us. That actually have it set, say, here's
a way that we're actually making it, and to make it easier for you to browse. And actually just kind of make it so
much easier and you won't have to worry or remember a lot of things,
like passwords, sometimes. Or even websites that
you go to more often. And as soon as you start typing
something in, it'll be right there and available for you. And that will end up getting
stored on your web browser, inside of the cache itself,
which is a small place in your computer memory that it actually
holds everything that it needs to. And that way, it seems like you're browsing so
much quicker than what you have access to. Sometimes, though,
these things can cause problems, too. Especially if you visit
a website a few different times. And all of sudden, it says, hey, no, it's
just not working the way that we want to. So we may wanna make sure that
we can change that setting too. So let me show you an example
of what I'm talking about. Well, for instance,
I just pulled up Microsoft Edge, which is Windows 10's browser by default. Now, they also have Internet Explorer
that's in there but this is the one they want
you to be able to use. So I've visited a few other
websites earlier today. So if I said, hey, I'm going to go and buy some, let's say RAM or
something like that. Or a peripheral that I'm
attaching to my Mac book here. So I can just go,
let's see I'll just try Amazon. And Don, it started to go ahead and
select Amazon for me. And even though it could do a search
in the background very quickly, I can see this icon right here that
shows us like a time clock, right? That have actually already been
there before at some point, and it automatically fed that for me. All I have to do is click there and
there it is. I'm actually now at Amazon and
I don't have anything typed in here. But if i logged in and
I wanted to be able to sign in and do that, I told it to remember me and
the password here. It could actually log me in
without me ever having to do that. So let's say that I wanna
check my email here, okay. So if I go to Gmail and Gmail inbox,
I wonder where that brings me. Let's see if I go from here, and look at
that, Don, it automatically logged me in. I didn't have to stop at
the web page login or do that, it just simply went ahead and said, hey,
look, let's just login and there we go. Now this technology, it started way back in the dial-up days
that when you were on a dial up modem, you had a very slow internet connection. So when you go to web
pages that have pictures, it would save a copy of the picture. So the next time you pull up a page,
it would load faster, right? It was all about performance. Now, it's about convenience though. And Ronnie, what you just showed us, it's caching way more than just pictures. Right. That was your log-in credentials, the pages you've visited, so basically a history of all
the sites that you've accessed. So all that is being stored
by your browser, and do we have any control over that? Are we able to clear it out? Or turn that off? Or tweak and customize it? Yeah, this is what we want to do, right? Sometimes you do need to actually be able
to clear this thing out when you need to. If you end up going to a website, let's say you purchased a subscription
to a particular website. And what you'll notice is
that when they go, hey, I can't access what I
think I need to access. The tech support on the other side
will say, clear your browser cache. And that's why you wanna know,
okay, well, how do I do that? Well, of course, they'll try and
walk you through it. But if you know how to do it,
it actually helps you out a lot more. So that way, they're clearing out what, maybe could be ash in there that may be
holding it back from what it's doing, or giving you old information
that you may see. So we wanted to clear that
out in Microsoft Edge, it's over here on the upper
right-hand corner. And if I hover over those ellipsis buttons
that're actually called settings and more, I can select that. And then as I scroll down through here,
I'm looking for where it says settings. If I scroll all the way down to
the bottom where it says settings, then I can take a look. And what I'm looking for is right here
where it says, browser data, okay. Clear browser data. Now, even though Don and and I described a little bit about what
we're actually seeing that's storing. If I click on this button where it says,
choose what to clear. Notice right now, it actually shows us, well, just about everything
that it can be storing. Okay? Browser history,
where you've been in the past. Cookies and saved website data. Cookies are objects that websites put on
our machine to let them know that we've been there before and that they can actually track us
just a little bit in that sense. So we're gonna have to keep
entering our credentials for different pages that they go to. Cached data and files, so
whatever else is actually already pulled in to make things easier for
us to browse, it can do that as well. Tabs that I recently closed, if you have a tabbed web browser,
which means these things up here, right? So notice I'm on one tab here,
I'm on another tab there. So it can even bring that up and say, hey, here's what I've actually seen
that you've actually had open. Well, let me get back down
here to what I was gonna do. You name it, Download history,
Form data, Passwords, Media license, Website permissions,
all of these different things. And if I wanted to clear
it out by default, it says, hey, I'll clear these out. So these are actually
the ones that are checked. But notice the things like Passwords,
okay. And Form data, and all that's not checked
here too, so otherwise you keep that. And you might be wondering like,
why do I wanna clear that out? You may not. You know, you may not wanna
clear out all that stuff. But this is where you can pick and
choose what you do want to clear out by simply putting a check
mark there to do so. Where I've seen this a lot more often is
when somebody's ended up on a training computer, when we used to do training. Where they said, I logged into my
company's email and now when I go to it, it's automatically logging me in. How do I get rid of that? Well, you want to go ahead and clear that
cache out so that it's not saving that data right there on that computer. You know, one place where I always see
this is at hotels that provide. They usually have a business computer
available down in the lobby where you can sit down and use one of their computers,
if you don't have your own. Well, if you fire one of those up,
you'd be surprised what's already cached in the web browser from
previous hotel guests. So it's important to know that these
settings are there so we can go and we clear them out,
knock the settings down. And this is, Ronnie's showing
us the Microsoft Edge, but it's really every browser that does this,
right? If you were in Firefox, or one of
the other ones, they've got the same basic concepts, correct? Yes Don, we pretty much will have the same type of settings, now they may
actually show up a little bit differently. Let me show you this in
Google Chrome just a little bit. In Google Chrome, here it is, unlike
where we saw inside of Microsoft Edge, where it kind of just pulled
up a side bar for us. Over here if I select this little stacked
button, I can go down to settings and now Don, the settings actually
aren't in that little bar any more, it looks like it brings us to a whole
another webpage, is what it does. And then when we scroll down and
I have to keep scrolling down, I have to span down the advanced and
then down here towards, there it is, is where it says
clear browsing history and more. It's kind of scary if
you're not exactly sure. And now you can see browsing history,
cookie and other data, cache images and files, you name it, the last hour, 24 days, look at all the stuff that you
can clear and select what you want to. Once again, it's fairly the same
objects that we saw, so regardless of what browser that we're in,
we can clear it out that way. And when you do go to a website and you do advice from the tech support
site that's saying, hey look, you gotta clear out your browser and make
sure that everything's actually working. This is one of the options that you
might actually have to be able to do fairly quickly. So make sure you know how to do that. And then you'll reset everything,
go back to the webpage and then just ask you to re-login and to set your credentials again. Now there is another option that's available in most browsers, where
maybe you know that you're only gonna be using this computer for a moment and
you don't want your data to be retained. There is a way, I say in most, but I'm
pretty sure every browser these days has it. Where you can choose to browse without the caching functionality and
there's different names for it like private browsing, or incognito. Ronnie, can you give
us an example of that? Sure, so this is that idea, right? Is that once we actually run that browser
we don't want it to save anything, okay, at the very end of it. So we're not leaving anything behind. At this point, notice that if I select
the same option menu over here, you'll see what Don's referring to
which says, new in private window. And if I select that new in
private window, it will change and you will see in the upper
left hand corner, the majority of the time it will
say incognito or in private. Anything like this and it gives us a nice little explanation
of what is going on when you use this. It says when you use the in private tabs,
browsing data like cookies, history, and temporary files isn't saved on
the device after you're done. So when you close out of the browser
itself, it will delete the actual data from the device after
the actual browser is closed. So once this is closed, then you won't
have that history stored anywhere else. It should be done. Now, Don, most people, though,
think that this means that they're secured in their browsing and
that's where there's a mistake. It doesn't provide any security,
it provides the ability for you not to have that
stuff saved afterwards. But they can still track
you if they need to. They can still do all that
while you're actually in here. And that's a really good point is all those things that get cached in a normal
browser, they're getting cached here too. The only difference is that
when you close this window, it's automatically purging that cache,
it's getting rid of the files. So it's not making you invisible. LAUGH] You're not all of a sudden become some secret agent and
nobody will know what you're doing. When you browse the Internet,
it's inherently non-secure, so you're able to be detected. But it makes sure that you don't leave
a whole lot of stuff behind on a computer. So if you are gonna use
that hotel computer, or even just a friend's computer. When you fire up that Web browser,
you switch into that Private Mode or Incognito. And now you know that when you close
it out, you didn't leave logged in credentials and other things like that
behind, so it's kind of a neat one. Now, that's not the only thing that
we have to watch out for on browsers. We focus on that cuz that's probably
one of the more common things. But there's a lot of other settings
that you can tweak that do help to improve security. One example of that is how
browsers handle scripts. There are a lot of exploits and vulnerabilities and
weaknesses that are out there, that take advantage of the various scripting
languages that are available via the web. And Ronnie, most browsers do give us some
kind of ability to be able to go in and tweak and manage those settings. Yes, on these, this is where it becomes a little bit
more tricky if you don't know much about what exactly to tweak, but some of
the language though is fairly direct and straightforward when you
actually need to do it. It's finding the actual right setting
is kind of the key here when you do this, okay? And remember that when you visit
some of the webpages, right? You're actually getting kind of
a conglomeration of a lot of different pieces from all over the place that's
on that webpage that you pull up. And they can run some type of
coding right on your machine. So browsers give us this
ability to change that. So here once again inside
of Microsoft Edge, I can show you where we actually
end up getting this to as well. So there's a couple of options here. Now, in Microsoft Edge, it's not a direct
option this way, which is kind of strange. They have it because they have two
different browsers on Windows 10, Internet Explorer as
well as Microsoft Edge. They have this stored inside of what
they call the Internet Options area. Now this is normally found
in our control panel, but if I come over here to the type search,
I can type in Internet options. And that will bring it up
in the control panel, and this is what I'll normally get access to,
okay? So right here this will control it for
both the Internet Explorer, as well as Edge then I can go to security, since Don mentioned security,
that is a natural path to do this. For me, setting up the settings here for
this zone called Internet, which is what everything has
actually done by default. Then I can come down here to where it
says Security Level for this zone and select Custom Level. It's in here that you start to see
things you may not hear about or be very familiar with. But notice it starts to talk about, some of those look like it's starting
with the programming language. If I start to scroll all the way down,
ActiveX Controls, down here towards the bottom. And I've gotta make sure I
don't pass through too fast. There it is, okay? Don was talking about
the idea of scripting. Was right here where we can
change scripting options. So for example,
Active Scripting right now, okay? Scripts that can essentially
run in my browser. Notice it's currently enabled, okay? So if I want to disable it,
I can go ahead and select the setting right here to disable
the Active Scripting that we need. And that would normally help us
to at least change that option to reduce that type of setting for us too. Now, you can take a look at some of the
other ones that are actually down here, applets and stuff like that as well. But overall though, it's that first
option, at least right now, for Active Scripting that really affects us
in terms of things like that JavaScript, like you were talking about. Yup and you do have to be a little careful on this
stuff because there are some websites that use these scripts to
actually make the website work. And so by turning off some of
the scripting, if you just go straight out to disable, you might break
some website functionality. And so if you encounter that, that's where this third option comes
in really handy which is to prompt. And it says if you go to a website
that wants to run active scripts, it will prompt you and say,
do you wanna run these? And now you can say, all right,
am I on a site that I trust? And if I am, I can say, yes. Or I'm on a site that I don't trust and
I can say, no. Well, you can use zones to define all that
as well, make it a little more automatic, but just be aware that there is a little
threshold that you cross where you can become so secure that the web just
doesn't work anymore [CROSSTALK] [LAUGH]- You can't see anything, yeah. And you don't wanna end up in that situation. All right, so Ronnie,
that's one example of securing things. And do you find that the manufacturers
of our web browsers, do you find that their default settings
are pretty adequate for most users, or do you find yourself
having to go in there and tweak a lot of these things on your own? Well, not everything. But if I was really at this point where
I'm worried about the active scripts are running and not at least prompting me
and asking, then I'll go ahead and do so. I'm not so worried about it, then,
yes, I need to get, or if I'm not so worried about it, it's probably adequate as long as you're
going to sites that are relatively safe. I don't know how else to describe it,
generic. If you go to sites where it can be
a little bit where you're like, look, free downloads here. Well now, you're taking that
risk of just saying, hey, you're already trying to get something for
free that you're not supposed to have for free, then yeah, you might actually run
into more of these scripts than you think. All right, and speaking of free, that made me think of something else. Web browsers have one primary function,
which is to display web pages. You go to a page, you see a page, and
there you go, very exciting, right? But because web browsers have become so
ubiquitous, they've become our standard tool for interfacing with the Internet,
a lot of people have seen where they might want to extend the functionality
of the web browser, adding more to it. So most web browsers,
and Firefox, Chrome, IE, all of them have what are called apps. Add-ons. Add-ons, yeah. Those things, those are a bit, or
they can be a bit dangerous as well, because now we're basically tacking
on software into our browser. So can you show us an example of how
we might use add-ons or extensions, or how we might just be on the lookout for
them as far as browser security? Sure thing. So when we start to take a look at this, normally if you're adding something
on to the broswer, right? You were trying to extend some of
the capabilities to make it a little bit easier to function,
to do what you want it to do, or maybe even to block something
if you also needed to as well. So you're saying, hey, in the browser, when it pulls us up,
if it's running this, stop them, okay? Make sure it doesn't allow us to do that. Most people like doing this for
things like ad blockers and stuff like this too, but it gives us that ability to add on that
extra component into the browsing window. Now, this depends on the browser as well. So if you go to things like Internet
Explorer and Microsoft, their pool of add-ons are not as big as something
like Google Chrome, is what you might see. Or even Firefox, which I think actually
has more than anybody else in terms of these different add-ons that
are actually available to you. So for you to add this in, though, it's actually relatively easy
depending on what you're doing. Let's take a look once again at
Edge here that will help us out. If I click on the little button here,
okay. Then what I want to do is come down and
Microsoft, there's extensions. Sometimes you'll see the other place. I think Google add- ons for
one reason or another in my head, I can check that. Now it brings you instead of directly
to a list of them, it says, hey, you gotta go to the store. Okay, not whose store, but
that is Microsoft store is what it is. And that's where you're doing it. You're getting it from the Windows
store here, or the Microsoft store. And when we do that, that will of course
lead up to, well, look at all these. Okay, extensions for Microsoft Edge. Boost the power of your browser
to get this handy extensions. A design for Microsoft Edge here. And you'll see that they have for
everything done underneath the sun. Okay, and it's amazing how many different
options that you can add in here. So the idea of AdBlocker, that's a pretty
popular one that you can add in there. Or you can even go down to adding
a OneNote clipper, if you have OneNote, another application that you
want to be able to say, hey, I wanna put this out in my browser and
pull that into OneNote, you can do that, too. Ronnie, I see Ghostery in the list. Have you ever used Ghostery? I have not used Ghostery. So it will make you re-evaluate the web. Because what it does is you can
go to a website, and it will show all the different places that your data
is being sent when you view a website. So an ad blocker blocks ads, right? But it doesn't necessarily tell you
about all the ads it's blocking, it just gets rid of them. With Ghostery, you can actually see that,
so when you wonder, how is my information getting shared,
how many different servers am I accessing, Ghostery will show you that,
it's really cool. And so if you're ever bored, check it out. Yeah, so I'm just gonna add that one in to show you how easy it is to add
an add-on in here, or an extension. And now notice it says that the product
is now installed, which is good, and I can see that it actually says,
hey, Ghostery, check it here and
let's see if everything looks good. I think that's it. Okay, there we go, okay. So now over on the right hand side, to start using it,
privacy AdBlocker, turn it on. Let's turn this thing on. It says it will see the websites you
visit, read and change anything that you receive from the web, you name it,
it will do that and there we go. So it will now show on the bar itself
on what we actually need, and you see the little icon here, Don, right here,
which is funny, a little ghost, of course. And all the setup that you can do. At this point,
if we now go to browse a page, right. So Don, what page should we browse and
see what we can find out here? Pick a news site cuz they're crazy. Okay. So if you go to cnn.com or something, each advertisement that's displayed in
the background is basically a connection to another server which may not be CNN's. It might be some ad service or whatever. And so look at the number on Ghostery
starting to count up. As each element of this
web page is loaded, it's showing us how many other
places it's connecting to. This type of visibility is really cool and it helps us to get an idea of
what's going on in the background. Well, some extensions like this one are,
they're good, they help you to understand your data. Some extensions can be bad though as well. It looks like it's part of the web
browser, but it is a separate program that's running that technically has
access to every website you go to. So if you login to your banking website,
your data is flowing through this extension or plugin, this add-on,
and it's able to see that data. So you've gotta make sure
that you trust the add-ons. Now, Ronnie got this from
the Microsoft App Store. It's gonna be safe. We can trust that, or if we get it from Google's Chrome Store,
you can typically trust those. But if you download a browser extension
from just some regular old website, that should be a big red flag. That's dangerous because your entire web
browsing session is available to those plug-ins, and that mean you could
leaking out data that you don't expect. It's quite amazing on things like that, that we don't think about, right? So most of the people that
aren't thinking about this, they don't know how much data they
are really actually showing people. So here, the browsing history and
everything. But for us here, it looks like
Ghostery has 27 trackers, and notice at that point we can even do
something that will help us to enhance anti-tracking, restrict a site,
trust the site, pause it. You name it, it will allow us to do that. So that is a feature of
what an extension can do. Now, if you're actually done with
that as well, I can select the, I right clicked on it and selected manage. If I wanted to uninstall it, okay, I just
simply select the uninstall button and that will also remove it too. So it's fairly easy for
us to be able to run those. Now, there is a chance of add-on or
extension overload, though, okay, where someone goes I need this for
this, I need this for this, and all of a sudden you have 15 or
20 different icons up there. Where you don't know exactly
what they're all doing, you think they're all
doing the same thing. But at the same time, that can then start to slow down all of
your browsing that you're actually doing, cuz it has to go and check through all
of those different ones that are on. So it's actually helpful, as long as
you pick the ones that you really need. Not helpful if you go, I'm just gonna
throw everything at it that I can think of underneath the sun to do it too. Yeah, absolutely, and affecting browser performance
is a big part of it. Compromising your privacy is another part. Those are all things we need to
be aware of whenever we add on. And we're talking about it in
terms of a web browser, but really it's even your
regular operating system. Any time you add software to it, you're putting trust in whoever
that software vendor is. All right, as we talk about some of
these things that are unsafe, right, if you work in an enterprise environment,
in a corporate environment, the company is gonna be concerned with
you keeping your data safe and protected. Not just you, you're not on your
own when you work at a company. And so a lot of them will leverage
advanced things like web filters or scrubbers where,
as you browse the Internet, all of your traffic is being filtered. So that if you go to a malicious web site, it's being cleaned before it
even gets to your computer. And that's commonly handled through
what's called a proxy server. Now a lot of web browsers have support for
that. Ronnie can you show us how we would
go about configuring a proxy in a web browser? Sure, when we start taking a look at that,
the idea is fairly simple. If you have that proxy set up, you just
have to redirect your browser to do so. Now finding those settings is not
the easiest thing if you haven't done it before. But we can show you where at least
the general settings are gonna be, and what you're gonna be looking for. Now once again, I'll use Edge to
help us out as well to do this. If I click on the button again and
I can scroll back down, I'm looking for that Settings options. So you're seeing where there's actually
something that's going to do that. And then I wanna select
View Advanced Settings. And notice that there is the option right
here where I've scrolled up to the top where it says Proxy setup. So it's right here for Edge,
I wanna call it Internet Edge. Now right here for Microsoft Edge,
I open up the proxy settings, and it's here that you can go ahead and
set this up right here, too, okay? Use a proxy server for
the connections that we're actually doing. At this point, this is what you would do. So if you have a script for it that will
do it, you just simply turn that one on. And you can add in the script address. Or if you know the IP address,
in other words, the network address and the port number that it's using,
you simply set the address up right here. And of course it says
the other things here. Proxy settings except for the addresses that begin with
these entries here too, okay? So all of those are possible
when you want to do that. And that way everything goes through that
filter like what Don was talking about. Before that she gets to you, and you're only connecting to that filter
really when you start doing this. Now Don, I see this on a daily
basis cuz I have satellite internet access. [LAUGH] And on that they don't directly take you to the website. They tell you that you should actually
be redirecting all of your browsers so this setting is active
on On ours at home for our browsers cuz it actually is going to
a proxy server that they've set up for us to make the browsing experience
seem a lot fast is what they've done. And so sometimes a proxy server
can help you to do that too. But on your end it seems a lot quicker
than what the other connection would be. ABout to go and shoot my connection
through space and go all the way out to a web server somewhere else besides where
it was ending up in its connection. So that's one of the general
settings that you'll end up seeing. And you'll see the same things
as long as you look for the proxy settings in whatever
web browser that you are in. Usually the configuration is just about
the same as what we showed you here Okay. All right, so Ronnie, you have shown us this episode quite a few
different features that are available on a web browser. I know it can seem overwhelming sometimes,
but these settings are available in pretty much every different
browser that's out there. And we do need to be aware of them. I know we still have a lot more
features to cover as well, though. So let's break this up into a two parter,
and in part two, we'll continue on and get a chance
to see some of those features. Now Before we wrap this one up though, do you have anything else that
you want to add before we close. Well, just remember right,
what we're taking a look at is all these different settings that you
may not have looked at before. But yes, if you're going to try and make
some headway into this industry, you need to at least take a look at some of these
different settings that are available and don't be afraid to switch browsers, okay. Take a look at some of the different ones,
you might find that There is one that you really like versus something and the other
ones that you go, it will adequately or sufficiently, you might end up finding
one that you really and get into and so, learn all that you can about that and you will be ready to go. All right, ladies and gentlemen in this episode we had a chance, Learn
a little bit about the data that's cached by our web browsers, we got to see private
browsing, or incognito mode and how we can save our data from being stored, the
opposite of saving our data, I suppose. We had a chance to talk about browser
extensions and add-ons and proxy servers, those are all important features in
a browser, we do have a lot more of those, so stay tuned for part two But as far as this episode is concerned,
we're going to wrap this one up. So signing off for
ITProTV, I'm Don Pozet. and I'm Ronnie Wong. And we'll see you next time. Thank you for watching IT Pro TV.
