Navigating with the Browser

A quick bit of history and perspective on your Android browser. It's built with WebKit, a web browser backend originally built for KDE, a desktop version of the (very geeky) Linux operating system. Apple, the maker of Mac, iPods, and iPhones, picked up the project and used it as the base for its Safari browser and all of the Mac's web abilities. WebKit has since been adopted by many software projects, including Google's Chrome browser and, yes, the browser on your Android phone. The Android Browser is not, however, Chrome for Android. It can render full web pages that look as they do on a desktop computer 99% of the time, and, with the 2.2 Android update, the Browser can even render sites that require Adobe Flash, putting it ahead of the pack in that regard. There's no built-in bookmark syncing or importing in Android Browser, but that's (hopefully) coming soon. A growing number of web sites are automatically detecting Android browsers and formatting their pages in ways that are friendly to smaller screens, and some are using the same formatting they prepared for iPhones, with varying success. In other words, the Browser (as we'll call it from here on out) is good at what it does, and should get more convenient in the near future.

Launching the Browser

There are two main ways to open up your Browser and get to a web site. The first and most obvious is to launch the Browser app. The newest Android phones have a Browser button that's always at the bottom of the home screen, to the right of the app tray. Any Android phone can launch the Browser from an icon on their home screen, or in the app tray.

The other way—the way I prefer, on my no-keyboard phone, at least—is to hit the Search button from the home screen. From the toolbar that drops down, you can type in a standard web address—completeandroidguide.com, as a totally random example—and the Browser will launch and head right there. You can also perform Google searches from this bar by simply typing in your query—"The complete guide to google android," perhaps. Either way you launch it, your Browser pulls up, and if you weren't searching for something specific, you'll see a customized Android home page.

Android Browser Home Page

As you'd expect from a browser, the links to other sites are rendered with underlined, colored links on standard web pages. The Google home page will try and get a general location fix from your GPS sensor, nearby Wi-Fi spots, or very rough triangulation from cellular towers, unless you've turned those features off in your phone settings. With that location fix, you can click the "Near me now" link to see restaurants, banks, or other points of interest nearby, and your searches will return local results near the top. Neat.

Your browser might not look exactly like the standard Android version, but it's probably pretty close. HTC's browser just moves some of the Menu buttons around, for example, and changes the shortcut name from "Browser" to "Internet."

Same with Motorola's tweaks to the Droid X browser:

HTC Internet Browser

If you're upgraded to Android 2.3, or "Gingerbread," your browser has the dark looks similar to the rest of Gingerbread's theme, but aside from that, it's basically the same browser, with some background technology fixes:

Android 2.3 Browser

Other than those cosmetic differences, any Android browser should work very similar to how the standard browser is described below.

Navigating to Locations

To move beyond the Google home page, look up at the toolbar near the top of your Browser window, then tap it.

Web Browsing Tool Bar

You'll see your most-visited URLs and bookmarks listed below the address box, and they'll change up to match your letters as you start typing in a new destination. The microphone icon to the right of the URL bar activates voice input, where you can speak your search queries, but not direct addresses. If you simply say "Yahoo.com," for example, you'll search Google for that query—which is kind of convenient, because it's the first result, but not quite as time-saving.

Want to head back to the page you were just on? Use your phone's physical Back button, or hit the Menu key and choose Back, or Forward if you want to go—yeah, you guessed it. Hold down the Back button to see a list of your recent web wanderings, and click any of them to jump in.

While you're navigating, you can also use your phone's Search button to bring down the URL bar, which acts just as it does from the home screen. Type in an address or write out a Google search, and you'll access it when you hit Go.

As you scroll down the page you're browsing with your thumb or the trackball, you'll see the URL bar scroll up and eventually disappear:

Disappearing URL Bar.

No need to worry, though—scroll back up, or hit your Menu button, and the URL bar reappears.

Zooming, Pinching, and Making Tiny Text Read-Able

Some tech-savvy sites have already formatted their web pages to detect Android browsers and offer up a special version of their pages that have bigger type and fewer columns, in order to be more friendly to small phone screens. Most sites, however, treat Android's browser like any other browser, and present a full page when you visit.

For example, here's the Washington Post, visited from an Android browser in June, 2010:

Washington Post Mobile Version from the Android Browser

Large type, cleanly laid out, and all in a single column to scroll through with your thumb. Head to the New York Times' main page on the same day, and you get this:

New York Times site not modified for small screens

Zoom with the Magnify Button

You can mostly read the headlines and get an idea of the pictures, but, man, that's tiny type. Android offers two solutions for dealing with this. On every phone, there are two magnifying buttons that appear in the lower-right corner as soon as you move the page a teensy bit with your thumb. They increase the size of everything on the page—text, pictures, borders, the whole deal. As you zoom in, the browser will shift things around and try to adjust the columns of text so they neatly fit the margins of your screen, usually with some success.

It should be noted here that many popular news and entertainment pages that don't offer a specific Android-friendly version of their page will have a standard "mobile" site you can get to, either from a link on the front page ("Try our mobile version"), or by heading to a slightly different address. Opening m.nytimes.com or mobile.nytimes.com brings up a universally smaller-scale Times, and the same URL change works for most sites, too. If not, try something akin to nytimes.com/m.

On newer Android models, Android has adopted the same finger controls that Apple pioneered with its iPhone. To zoom in on a particular focus point on the page, place two fingers over the point, then spread them apart from that point. Note the green box in the thick-fingered illustration here—it's the same picture outlined in green in both slides, but in the right-side example, I've pulled my fingers apart.

Zooming in on a particular focus point.

Think of it like operating a camera lens that focuses as you twist or raise it, or having a thin layer of Silly Putty over your screen that stretches the text as you stretch it—with better results, obviously, than you probably remember from your childhood newspaper blotting. To zoom back out again, place two fingers in separate spots on the screen, then bring them together in a "pinch," the opposite of the zoom motion.

More useful for reading is the specific column sizing you can do with your fingers for pages with a good deal of text. Click on an article headline at the New York Times, and you'll arrive at an article that's formatted for a standard browser:

Article Formatted For a Standard Browser. A little hard on the eyes.

It's decent, but if you're going to actually read all that text, you'll want to go easier on your eyes. Tap twice anywhere inside the main text column, or on an image, and the browser will reformat the column margins and word flow to better fit that text or picture.

Reformatted view after a double tap of the text you want to read.

Better. But let's say you want really big text, or text of a very specific size, so that the pictures don't smoosh the words to any side and you feel like your phone is simply a portal to a page of text. Go ahead and use those two-finger spread and pinch motions to get the text exactly the size you want it, then double-tap it again again with your finger. You could also use the magnifying buttons that continue to appear in the lower-right, but your fingers give you more fine control.

Further Zoom of the text

And there you have it—the perfect view for those Sunday mornings where you don't want to get out of bed, so you reach for your phone, dial up the news, and read it right there, because you're too cheap to shell out for the paper and too lazy to get up just yet and feed the cats. Or so I've heard.

Bookmarks

Back to the browser and all its buttons. What's that ribbon-with-a-star icon to the right of the URL bar? That's the Bookmarks icon, also reachable from the Menu button. Go ahead and click it.

Bookmarks Tab

Your main Bookmarks tab is where you'll see, well, your bookmarks. On a just-out-of-the-box phone, you'll probably have a host of pre-loaded bookmarks for popular sites and services—the New York Times, ESPN, and the like. If you've got a whole lot of bookmarks, it might be convenient to hit the Menu button and choose List View for a text-only scroll. Keep your pre-loaded bookmarks if you'd like, or press and hold on a bookmark to pull out the menu so you can delete it. Note that pressing and holding on a bookmark also lets you edit its name and address, add it as a direct shortcut to your home screen, and copy or "Share" a bookmark.

Want to change your home page? This is where you do it, by pressing and holding a bookmark and choosing that option. Want to add a bookmark? Navigate to the page you'd like to add, press the Bookmarks button, then choose the top-left box with the star, and "Add" text.

Hit the Stars on the Right to Create Bookmarks

Your other two tabs, Most Viewed and History, work in the same basic way as your bookmarks, and the press-and-hold commands are the same. The main difference is that your recent and most-visited pages aren't yet bookmarks, but you can make them bookmarks by clicking the star icon to the right of each.

Managing Multiple Windows

Hit "New Window" in the Browser Menu

Back in the main Browser window, hit the Menu key to pull up your options. On the top left and right sides, there are "New Window" and "Windows" buttons, respectively. Hit "Windows" to see how your browser handles multiple web pages.

Moving an app icon

If you're looking at a web page and want to open a new page while keeping the page you're looking at open, hit Menu and choose the "New Window." Your new window will open to the home page you picked out, and you can then browse to whatever you want to look at. It's also worth noting that certain web pages design their links to automatically open in a new window, so you may accumulate a few different open windows while you browse around. From the Windows page, you can close open windows with the "X" button next to each, switch to one of your open windows, or open a new windows. It's not a bad idea to occasionally clean out your browser windows if you haven't done so in a while, but neglected windows also cache themselves in a way that requires little memory, so it shouldn't be strictly necessary.

Refreshing and Stopping

Browser Refresh Button

In the lower-left corner of your Menu button offerings, you'll usually see a Refresh button, which, as you might imagine, reloads the page you're looking at. If you pull up your Menu while a particularly slow-loading page is grinding away, though, it becomes a Stop button, which kills the strain on your data connection and processor, and then immediately turns back into a Refresh button.

Searching For and Selecting Text

Android is full of "More" menus that seem to hide really cool stuff, and the Browser is no exception. There are three main tools you'll only find in the More menu for selecting text, finding text on a page, and "sharing" a page though many of your installed apps.

Selecting Text

Need to copy an address or other bit of text from a web page, so you can paste it later into an email or a web search? Here's how to pull it off.

On the page that's got the text you want, hit your Menu key, select More, then pick "Select text." It seems like nothing has happened, but if you move the trackball around, you'll notice that there's now a computer style cursor to move around.

Selecting Text

Once you've spotted it, move it to the beginning of where you'd like to start selecting text. Now click down on the trackball. Next, move the cursor to the end of the text you're selecting, so that the text you want is highlighted. Click the trackball again, and your text is copied to the phone's clipboard—the equivalent of performing a "copy" maneuver on a standard computer. Note that you can actually select the text you want to copy with your finger, too, but, at the moment, it requires a frustrating level of accuracy, and you're usually better off using the trackball, as wonky and old-school as it may feel.

Placing Selected Text in the Search Box

With that copied text, you can press your finger and hold it on any text area on your phone, then select "Paste" from the menu that pops up to drop your text in. Web searches, emails, Facebook, or Twitter updates—anywhere you want.

Selecting Text in Android 2.3

As described in an earlier chapter, perhaps the most notable feature of Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" is its much, much improved text manipulation, and this carries over to the browser. 

Selecting Text in Android 2.3

When you see some text on a page you want to copy, press and hold your finger somewhere in the section for a second or two. Two orange "paddles" will appear, which you can drag to define the start and end of a selection, highlighted in orange. Tap again inside the orange highlight to copy the text, or click down on your tracking device, if you have one.

Finding text, and all other aspects of the browser, remain the same as shown in this chapter. A bigger upgrade, it seems, is further down the Android upgrade line.

Finding Text

This one's fairly simple. Hit Menu, choose More, then select "Find on page."

Finding Text

Enter the text you want to pin down in the search box, and the browser will automatically find the first match as you type, and provide forward and back arrows for multiple matches. This is another smart place to use the select-copy-paste text method, described in the section above, for doing a little light research or location scouting from your phone.

Share Page

It sounds like just another way to bug your friends—email them about this page you found. Yeah, sure, you can do that—but "Share" means a lot more on an Android phone.

Share Menu

On my phone, for example, my Share menu in the browser, and other places, has a few interesting options. I can "share" pages and files through a Bluetooth connection to a computer or other device. In practice, that means I can wirelessly transfer the odd file or two to my laptop when I don't have a transfer cord handy. Evernote is a nifty kind of web-based memory system where you can upload links, pictures, audio notes, and text snippets, and then tag them all so they're easy to pull up later (it's how I gather gift ideas). You can guess how Gmail, Facebook, and Messaging work. "Open in LastPass" is a result of signing up for and installing an app from LastPass, a nifty password service that's very secure and accessible from anywhere. "Read Later" is a great, free application that does one clever thing—installs this "Read Later" option in the browser's Share menu, so that articles are sent to the Instapaper web service. Instapaper then strips down the page to just the text and primary pictures, and keeps them all stashed online for whenever I want to read them (hence "Read Later.")

Phew. That's the long and short of browsing on an Android device. The browser is one of the core elements of an Android phone, as you'll see as we move on. Note, too, that this is an overview of the main browser on an Android phone, but there are many others you can use that work in a similar way with different features—or completely different, in some cases. To see a few recommended options, head to the chapter on App Alternatives.

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