All right, welcome back everybody
to another episode of ITProTV. I'm your host, Don Pezet and we are coming
back at you with compTIA IT fundamentals. In this episode, we are continuing
on from our previous episode, we were talking about
web browser settings. So if you didn't catch part one, you'll
definitely won't wanna jump over and that a look at that. But here in part two, we're gonna continue
looking at some other features that we didn't get to in the first part. And here to help do
that is Mr Ronnie Wong. Ronnie thanks for joining us. Well Don, thank you again for joining
me as we continue on IT fundamentals, take a look at different settings
that we have available to us. To be able to change the browser
a little bit customize settings so we can make it do what we need to do. A lot of times even more importantly
if the business requires it, right? We actually make the settings the way
that they want to be required as well. So in this episode we are gonna
take a look of course at the idea of certificates that we
can actually verify and see that were connected to the right web
server that we need to be connected to. Talk a little bit about
pop-up browsers as well. And then how do we check for
website compatibility? In other words, the applications
that are running out there, will my browser actually support it or
will it look broken just all the time? And I won't be able to do
anything about it as well. So those are kind of the remaining
settings that we have to do unless I've missed one. I think let's just print
out everything here. But overall Don, that should help
us to round up our set of settings. All right, let's kick things off
with an important security measure which are certificates, right? Web browsers have support for
HTTP and HTTPS traffic and that's just the secure version
of regular web browser traffic. And we do that the security
provided by a certificate system. So how does that system work and what
does it look like inside of a browser? When we start take look at the idea of
the certificate and what it actually does for us, it validates that we're connecting
to the server that it says it is. And the reason why it's actually
important to do that, is that Don, I don't know where a particular
service is on this planet, okay. So if I connect to amazon.com
just as an example, I don't know if it's in the next room. Which, actually I do know
it's not in the next room. But it could be anywhere on this planet. Well, how do I know it's
really a server from Amazon? Or is it Don Pezet actually saying,
hey, I'm Amazon. So what companies can do, is they can go
and purchase a third party certificate that validates and
verifies that this is their server. And then they put that digital
certificate on those servers, when I connect to it I should be
able to get a copy of that server. And it gets validated that way. That way I know that I am
connecting the right server. If they hand a certificate
that's not valid, well nobody is going to attest that. They're not gonna say, hey, yeah,
that's actually the right server. They're gonna instead gonna return to
me something that's gonna say, no, we can't prove that this is
the server that it claims to be. And when you see something like that, you
should kind of be suspect about whether or you're not really connecting with who
they say that they're connecting. So, it's very important that we start
to be able to understand when we connect to certain sites that they
have some certificate on this. Especially if you're doing some
type of business transaction. Do not put your debit card or
your credit card information in a site that doesn't at
least validate what sort are there on. All right, so Ronnie,
if I'm browsing the web, how do I know if a site is secure or
if it isn't secure? So must of the sites today
when you go to browse to it, it will give you a nice notification
right on the address bar. Let me show you what I'm
talking about right here. So I brought up our own website, ITPro.TV, and I'm gonna take a look up
here in the address bar itself, I can see that up here, it actually
shows me this nice little green here. Now, this is because we also have an
extended validation certificate as well. Sometimes, you'll see that the green may
not be there, but on this one, if I click on just that part of it, it will tell me,
here's the website identification. And it shows me what actually
has been identified here. It says hey, this is actually identified
by ITPro.TV, DigiCert says yes, we can do that. And it says should I trust this site? It allows us to know that we actually
did connect to the site that we believe that we've connected to, okay. So when that's actually done, it's a lot of times a visual reminder
in that way that it can happen. But there is other places though
that you may not see that. So for instance here,
let me go to this one right here, which I've already pulled up. If I select this, notice it says here,
connection isn't encrypted. That's all that that one says. But I can go to another one,
this is what I wanna get to. Is this one,
cuz this one is actually a secure type but notice this one don't have
any green on it, Don, okay? And Don, you're explaining that this one
is just the idea that is validation but it's not that extend
validation like what we have. Right, so when you buy a certificate, you have
to prove that you are that person. So for example with ITPro.TV, when we
bought the certificate we had to prove that that we owned that domain and
there's two ways to do it. There's regular validation, where they
just basically send you an email to an ITProTV address to verify you
have control of that, right? That's one way, but
that can be spoofed or intercepted, you could potentially
have a false certificate. So extended validation, EV,
is where they go a step further. They call you on the phone. They request billing statements or bank account statements that
prove that you are that entity, that you are that company, so you have
to be able to act on their behalf. And by doing that extended validation, you know for a fact that this
certificate was issued to that company. And that's why you get the nice big
green block, and the green lock, it's calling that out. This company went through
the extra steps to get verified. Now, the website you were bringing
up a moment ago, it's called badssl, but their certificate, it doesn't mean their certificate is
invalid It's actually a good certificate. Right. They didn't just go through the extended validation. It is a few reasons that
usually comes down to cost. Extended validations certificates cost
about ten times as much as a regular certificate. So they're expensive. But in this case,
this site is just a demonstration site. So they don't need extended validation. They can just say, look, here we're
encrypted to a regular standard, so you get the lock, the data is encrypted,
it is protected, but it's not as a high level of validation
as you would have with like an EV cert. And this is important for us to be
able to notice and identify right away. It wasn't too long ago where everybody
on the web started to actually do this, where you also see like HTTPS up here too, where you're typing that in to make sure
that you can get connected to the website. But before that, right, there wasn't any
encryption involved and it was just HTTP. Well, then they also didn't have
a certificate involved with it sometimes too. So you didn't know whether or not you
were really connecting to that site. So how did that end up showing up? Let's say that you have a certificate but it's no longer any good because they're
only last for a certain periods of time. For you have to renew them again. Well, this site gives me this
ability to show you that cuz it's a lot more difficult Don today to
find a website, out on the Internet. I was just trying to
think of some of that. I know who used to have one. Cisco.com but they are just enter the
basic corporate websites I was like, hell no they hadn't sort of secured that and
now they have secured that which is fine. But if I click on a site
that doesn't have one, the great thing is the browser
kind of stops us, okay? So it actually says,
hey look this site is not secure, okay. This might mean someone's
trying to fool you or steal your information that
you're sending to the server. Are you sure? Well, if I click on details, I can see
that it actually has a flag error here. The website security certificate is not
yet valid or has expired at that point. If we go and take a look back
up here at the address bar, well now notice the difference
between this and the homepage that we were on too Is that
it no longer has that little lock on it. This one just has site information,
so it says show site information. Now this one says it's a secure Microsoft
Edge page, that's all it's saying. But overall, though, it's just saying,
there's certificate, and this one is supposed to be,
I think expired. So it doesn't mean that the certificate
itself is spoof or anything at this point. I guess it could but it's just
saying that it's no longer valid. So, we're not confirming anymore cuz
it's out of the validity dates of whoever has actually
issued the certificate. So, we can see that very easily
by going to these sites and most of your browsers will do
something very similar to this. If it doesn't tell you where this
site is secure, please go back. It might even get you a little bit more,
I'm trying to bring up, I think there was one where it actually
just brought you directly into that site itself, so that you could see it. Let me add SSL is what I want. Keep typing in wrong letters there,
all right. Let's see what happens when I go to it. Now, you don't really wanna do
this on the Internet itself as far as your own page but
this one is for demonstration. So, you might even see that it
actually kind of does this, where it takes everything,
turns it into this entire red page here. But it will let you go on if you
actually say I don't care about that and let you proceed on to. Sometimes, you'll also have the browsers
that will automatically have security settings on them, what they call their own
smart settings that are in the background. That try and keep a connection of what are known as bad listed or
listed bad websites that are out there that are warning you
to stay away from these sites, too. So once those things are up,
you should see something too. And here it is,
here's the certificate error. And let me show you what this one
actually shows as well, okay? So, website problem. That's all this one says. And then click on that link here and
be able to find out some more information. But both of those are something
that we should be looking out for as we start to browse around. Especially, we're trying
to stay connected. If you have paid for a service,
don't just go, okay, I'll type this in and you go to the site. If you don't see the lock,
if you can't validate the certificate, somebody may be trying to
fool you into doing that. Just realize that those are some of
the different ways to easily spot that. All right now, certificates, those help
with validating the identity of a website, so now we know we can trust the website. But even on some websites that we trust, they do things that we
don't necessarily like. And I know one thing that really
bothers me are advertisements, right? But even worse, our pop-up advertisements
where I go to a website and another window pops up
with some kind of an ad. And if they had embedded
the ad in the website, we would kind of know whose fault it was. But when that pops up,
they're doing that to kinda make it where it doesn't seem like they're
the ones who causes the ad. That's truly frustrating I
know most modern web browsers have a pop-up blocker that is built in can
you show us how that functionality works. Sure Don, right here in Internet
explorer just like in every other browser setting you'll probably
see that they made it so obvious because this was so annoying at
that point in history on the Internet. That instead of trying to make a fancy
name for it, secure your browser, or third party security. They just said we're just
gonna call it pop-up blocker. And I believe that that's kind
of universal in every browser so that you don't mistake the setting. So here on Microsoft Edge if I
click on the ellipsis button again. I can scroll down to the settings and in a moment, I have to continue to
scroll to the advanced settings. There is a simple toggle button inside of Microsoft Edge where it says,
block pop-ups. So if you turn this off,
well it will no longer block pop-ups. And you go to a site that already has
all these things loaded and ready to go. You will get pop-ups that would
just kind of populate your screen. And you'll just be browsing and
have to click off of it. And the problem is,
when you click off of it Don, sometimes you don't know what
you're actually really clicking on. And that could have actually launched one
of those scripts that we were talking about in an earlier episode
that were taking a look at. And so you might actually be promoting
the actual issue and problem and doing that instead of actually kind of
closing out what you think that you could. So these pop-up blockers,
they appear just about everywhere that you have ready to go when you do that too,
okay? So that's actually kind of the idea and
we had already looked earlier when Don had also mentioned the idea of add-block,
the ability for ads to come out. They are bad, okay, there's no doubt. But we can also do what we
did a little bit earlier, which is download from the extensions,
or what they call add-ons, right? And you'll see that there's a bunch
of different ones that are available out there for you. And they effectively try and block not
the majority of the ads that you end up getting without you asking for
the ad to come in. So take advantage and look and you can
actually see, everybody of course says there's is the best, I don't know if
anybody knows which one's actually the best one that there is but there's
a lot of different options like that. And just because the pop-up says that
you won a free dinner at Red Lobster doesn't mean that you actually did, that used to be a popular one I
haven't seen that one in a while. And one of the reasons
why we don't see them so much anymore is a lot of us
use things like ad-blockers. Right, and we talked about it
in Extensions and Add-ons, but a lot of ad-blockers will take
care of not just pop-ups, but script-blockers, or scripts as well. I think in part one we talk
about those kind of separately. But, during the break Ron you had shown me
another piece of software that you had. What was it called? TunnelBear? That would actually allow to, basically, manage all of that to stop
scripts as well as other things. Can you do a quick demonstration for
the viewers? Yeah,
Don I can show us Tunnel Bearhere. And, when we take a look at TunnelBear,
this is where at some point we remember that different browsers will
have different add-ons or extensions that we can put in there. TunnelBear is only really available
inside of Google Chrome for us, so I have to launch up the Chrome browser. Now down on my taskbar, we went ahead and
installed Google Chrome. And when I launch up Google Chrome, I'm going to select the Settings button
over on the upper right-hand corner. Then go down to Settings. And then it's in the webpage
where we have the settings, I can click on that little icon with the
three bars across it, select Extensions. And then I have to go back to
Extensions again because it's not in there by default. You see a few of them there. But I open the Chrome webstore. And this where we'll see a lot
of the extensions as well. So, you can take a look and see that there
are a ton of different extensions that are listed here by comparison of what
we saw in the Microsoft Edge store, there's a lot more is what
we end up seeing too. So let's search now tunnel,
if I can spell tunnel, there. What I'm looking for
is this second option. Now it looks funny, right,
it says TunnelBear Blocker. I select that one. Block ads and
take a bite out of online tracking. It blocks many types of online tracking, ad blockers ignore everything to
show some content to publishers. You name it you can do this and
you can choose what you can do here. So, all I have to do is simply add
this to the Chrome browser and then make sure it says hey
are you sure it can read and change all of your data on
the websites you visit. Add the extension in and in the moment
it's checking, it's verifying, and now you can see that there is
a confirmation, that is edited all in, do what we actually wanna do. Use extension by clicking on the icon, so
it tells me exactly what I need to do, and now if I click on the icon, it shows
me that it's actually on at this point. All we have to do now is,
we can browse to a website to help us out. So we're gonna choose another website,
the last time we chose CNN, so we choose Fox News this time. Fox-
We're gonna be fair and balance. News Fair and
balanced is what we'll do here, and we'll see what ends up
happening on this one. And you can see this number is
starting to to crawl up again okay, so there it goes it's continuing 24, 25. It's 27, it's continuing to do
some blocking here for us and now you can see where it's
actually blocking 28. It looks like it's gonna continue
to add up here in just a moment, it doesn't look like its
actually partway through. Look at that Don it looks like it's only
like what, a quarter of the way through or maybe a fifth of the way through. There's a lot of elements, and you'd be surprised when you go to
this websites,like news websites. Well they're not charging
you money to go there. They are making money one way or another
and typically it's through advertisers and connections to other systems
that are tracking data values. So that's why it's so important to be just aware of all
of this type connections and so. Blocking pop-ups, blocking scripts,
blocking things from companies that you're not engaging with directly,
it can usually be a good idea. But it can potentially break some site
resources, so always be aware of that. Yeah, and on this one, since Don only
mentioned it, if we kind of full screen, so I can zoom in and not cut everything
off here 18 ads, five social buttons, three fingerprinting,
three script trackers. It breaks it down and we can even turn off
what we don't want and what we do want by simply toggling it, and there it
goes it went up to 30 at this point, and it's probably still counting up. So it's a nice addition of some of
the things that we can do in terms of Something like ad blockers
that really do help us out and that's just another one that we can
show an example of that's right there. But everybody will have their favorite, if you ask anybody that has anytime
that they love that browser, they probably pick some type of ad blocker
to also install as an extension there too. All right, so we've had a chance to
talk a little bit about security related features and some advanced things there. Beyond security though, web browsers
are changing very, very fast, right? New browsers come out all the time and
we've talked about Internet Explorer, we've talked about Microsoft Edge,
Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, those are probably the biggest ones. But if we really wanted to go crazy
we could tackle Apple Safari and Vivaldi and Opera. Opera. [LAUGH]
And there's like almost limitless list of web browsers that are out there. When somebody designs a webpage,
they've got to take into account all these different browsers and try and
make it as compatible as possible. And so as an IT technician, one of
the things that I deal with is running into websites that aren't
compatible particular browsers. So, can you tell us a little bit about
how that compatibility works and even how we can test that on our own? Yeah, now Don,
this is kind of the weird one, right? The very fact is you may go to one website
with whatever browser you choose and it looks great. You get on to somebody elses machine,
and you try and show them through a browser
you haven't used before. You're not as, you go, okay,
it's just a browser, it's no big deal. You go there and some of the stuff looks
like it's missing or out of place in what it's doing, or it just tells
you you can't actually look at it. Or it just looks bad when you start seeing
that, and that is when the web design itself is working in one browser versus
not working in another browser overall. And that means you have to figure out
how that can actually be done and what happens. What Don was saying here is that people
who design this, they have to think about this, who their target audience is gonna
be and, sometimes they may go look, we can only support this one browser or
these two browsers. And they go, on the rest no
we're just not going to do that. But most websites that want you to have
a higher flow of traffic to that website, they are gonna try and
make it as compatible as possible, but at the same time also offer
the ability to go look, there are certain browsers
we don't want to accept. Older ones that aren't up to date that can
cause other issues on those computers. So what's the way that we
can test some of this? Well, you simply take your
website you just open it up, and all the different browsers that
are out there, that are possible, that you go, here's a chance Don's
gonna be using Internet Explorer, okay? And you go all right,
does it work or does it not? Well, he can just launch it up and see and when that happens, then you
kind of go, all right, that looks good. Doesn't look good, or you can also try and
test it out in different ways. I found a site that
really does help you out, at least in getting you started if you're
a developer to try and see whether or not your website design is going to
be compatible with what we have. So we'll take a look at my screen here, this is from www.browsercompatible.com. All right, so
let's take a look at this website. This actually shows us the ability to
do some browser compatibility, and so it checks your website for, actually, for
all these Don just mentioned just about. And is your website
cross-browser compatible? We can just submit our url and
get a report, and maybe even begin to solve your own
problems at that point if you wanted to. So let's just take our website, Don,
and actually type it in here and see what ends up happening if we do this. So I do just itpro.tv a little bit small,
but in just a moment it will of course
bring up this nice report for you and show you, here we go okay? And here's a nice little legend right, fully compatible with the green check
marks, some flaws in the implementation. A lot of unexpected behaviors or unimplemented features that may
be a bad thing, Don, I think. And outright not supported, yeah,
maybe not, okay so you can see that. Now here's where it begins for
someone that's developing for a website, right, Don? The idea, these are different languages,
is that what we call, yeah. Yeah, so when you view a webpage,
webpages are typically written in what's called HTML,
the Hypertext Markup Language. But then they use additional features to
customize the way things look cuz HTML is really not all that powerful,
it's only got a handful of commands in it. So they normally combine it with something
called CSS, or a Custom Style Sheet. Every website uses CSS these
days to make it look pretty, well the problem with CSS is
it's changed over the years. And see how they're measuring for CSS 2.1,
not every web browser supports CSS 2.1. And that's not the fault of the website,
it's the fault of the web browser. But as a web designer,
if you want your website to look pretty, you have to figure out,
well here's this one technique I wanna use that looks really good, but
is not supported in Internet Explorer 6. [LAUGH]
Is that okay? Well, Internet Explorer 6 was
the default web browser in Windows XP. Windows XP came out in 2001, 17 years ago. Yeah. [LAUGH] And how many people are still running Windows XP today? Microsoft doesn't even support Windows XP
or Internet Explorer 6 anymore. So is it bad that we don't
support Internet Explorer 6? No, you shouldn't be running IE6, IE6 is a very non-secure browser
that puts your data at risk. You shouldn't be using it, but
that's something we have to think about. That there is this cut off that when
you create a website you can try and support as many browsers as possible, but
there comes a point where you have to sacrifice some browsers for the sake of
security or for the sake of functionality. And that's kind of what you're seeing
here, is that we've actually got pretty good browser support for most things, but
there are some settings every here and there where maybe we don't support IE7 or
IE8. And that's okay because most people
should be running IE 11, right? That's the area where you
have to keep in mind. And this is just a great
report it allows us to see a lot. I don't know if this has
been updated recently, since this says that 9+ Which I assume
is a little bit dated at this point. But overall though, we can see some of the
things, no issues found on these things, on the doms here. And as you continue on, HTML4. Look, it seems like for
our site, no issues on HTML 5, which is probably one that we really
are wanting to make sure that we get into. And then from that point,
if there's other errors, this is where the developer
can use these to help to track down some of the different things
that are actually out there for us. But it all depends on what your
site needs to be compatible. Now, this also helps you if
you're just browsing, okay. If you're browsing and you're saying, hey, I don't know why this website
isn't looking the way it should. Or why isn't it actually coming in
the way that I think it should? You can just simply come here,
at least as a basic test. Type it in here and see if your browser
and your version number is supported. And as you take a look at
what you're looking in, all of a sudden you realize your IE
seven or eight is not working too much. Well, don't be surprised since those
things are now probably a decade old as well. But at the same time, it at least gives
us that ability to check that out, okay? So it's not always about having to
test out with every single browser, you might be able to find sites like this. And this was one that
I found fairly easily, to be able to at least show us this too. And you might find out that some sites, right, even after you find
out that they're compatible, one will actually run better than
the other on that site as well. So you'll just have to test it out
that way manually at some point. All right, well, Ronnie, I think we
have run through a pretty good gamut of features inside of the web browser, and
just a lot things that we can tweak. Now, keep in mind that we could've
ignored all of this, right? And just run with the default
settings from the vendor, whoever made your web browser, but I think
we've all seen throughout part one and part two that some of
the default settings, some of the default functionality
is not exactly what we want. And it's nice to be able to get in there
and adjust and control that ourselves. Now, before we wrap this one up, Ronnie,
do you have anything else you wanna add? Well, remember this is what we
said at the beginning of the series. Browser is probably gonna be one of
the main applications that you'll see used on just about every desktop,
whether you're in a working environment or in a home environment. So it's a good thing for you to understand
that people will choose whatever browser that they want to, but
know that all these settings that we went over are probably
available in all of them. So there's not one that's
not gonna be available, and then you might have to search a little bit
harder and figure it out, but all these are actually available depending on your
need and what you want to customize there. They're ready for you to take a look at. Well, ladies and gentlemen,
that's gonna wrap this episode up. In this episode we had a chance to talk
about certificates, popup blockers and script blockers, as well as testing for
browser compatibility. All important things when supporting web
browsers in an enterprise environment, but also just in your own home,
all really useful features to have. Ronnie, thank you for
contributing all that. All right, and for you guys out there in
TV land, we're gonna wrap this episode up. But stay tuned because there's more
CompTIA IT fundamentals to come. We have a lot of objectives to get to, and we're just wrapping this one up
right here before moving on to the next. We look forward to seeing you there. But for now, signing off for ITProTV,
I've been your host, Don Pezet. And I'm Ronnie Wong. And we will see you next time. [MUSIC] Thank you for watching ITProTV.
