Everything you view over the Internet is temporarily downloaded to your computer. Your Internet software is therefore only seeing files that are on your hard drive! To get those files to your hard drive is what the software does when you load a page. It does this with a Hyper text transfer protocol or HTTP.

On a web page, every picture is a separate file, which needs to be downloaded too! Even lines, dots and shaded areas are perceived as graphics, and therefore are downloaded as separate files as well! This means that

Help: "The back button does not go back to a page that I just visited!"

If you backtrack and then go a different direction, (for instance, when you look for several sites on a search engine’s results) the back button does not go back to other “branches” of your search.   In the figure above, the back button will go from D all the way back to B and A, but will not show C anymore.

Use the history or Go button for this.

Help: "The web page has outdated information!"

Sometimes, your information has changed (like a stock quote or the weather! However, your software will only look at the pages downloaded on your computer and does not find any updated information. Click on Refresh to tell the software to download the page again! (F5 in Explorer and Menu View Refresh in Netscape Navigator.)

Attention: Those pictures that you just have been viewing, are now stored somewhere on your hard drive. Even if you erase the websites from your browsers history, those pictures can still be viewed in

IN EXPLORER
C:\WINDOWS\Temporary Internet Files
IN NETSCAPE
C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\your name\cache