Browser SettingsOptional for Computer Science
🎬 This chapter has a 12:38 video: Web Services →Two students open the same website on the same model of phone and get two different experiences — one sees advertisements popping up, the other does not; one is already logged in, the other is not. The website is the same. The browser settings are not.
1What settings are
Every browser has them, in a menu usually called Settings or Options (in Chrome: the ⋮ menu → Settings). The names differ a little from browser to browser; what they do does not.
Pick a setting, then switch it and watch the same browser behave differently.
Home page set to the school site — this is what opens.
Set it to your school's site and every new window starts there instead of a blank page.
2The settings you should know
| Setting | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Home page | The page the browser opens with, and where the Home button goes |
| Browsing history | The list of pages you have visited — and clearing it |
| Cache | Saved copies of page files, so a repeat visit loads fast |
| Download location | The folder every downloaded file is saved into |
| Cookies and site data | Whether websites may store cookies on your computer |
| Pop-up blocker | Whether a site may open extra windows by itself |
| Default search engine | Where words typed in the address bar are sent |
| Privacy / incognito | Browsing without saving history, cookies or form data |
3Settings and your privacy
History, cache and cookies are all records of what you did, stored on the computer you used. On a shared or school computer, that matters: the next person can see where you went and may still be logged into your accounts.
4From the board papers
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A web browser is the software that requests a web page from a web server using its URL and displays it on screen. Two commonly used browsers: Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
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(iii) Avast. Avast is antivirus software. Chrome, Firefox and Edge are web browsers.
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Browsing history is the list of web pages visited, kept with their addresses and the time of the visit. The cache is the browser’s store of copies of page files — images, stylesheets, scripts — kept so that a page visited again loads faster without downloading everything a second time.
What the browser itself does, step by step, is on the Web Browser page; the cookies setting gets a page of its own in Cookies.
5Check yourself
Riya clears her browsing history but a website still greets her by name. Why?
Which setting decides the page a browser opens when it starts?
A school website was updated yesterday, but Arjun's browser keeps showing last week's notice. The most likely fix is to: