Accessing the Internet on the Galaxy Tab 4 Using the Chrome Browser App
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It should come as no surprise that Google pre-installs its Chrome web browser on Android OS devices, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 is no exception. You don’t have to use Samsung’s built-in Internet browser to access the Web—you can use Chrome by tapping the Chrome icon on the Home screen as shown in Figure 1.
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Figure 1. The importance Samsung gives to Chrome is demonstrated by the Chrome icon’s placement on the main Home screen.
After you open the Chrome app, the Google home page appears on the screen. You can tap the Google search box in the center of the screen to enter term(s) you want to search for on the web.
Browsing to a URL
The Chrome app allows you to type a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which can be a website name or a specific page on a website, into the app. The Chrome app doesn’t require you to type the “http://” or the “http://www.” at the beginning of the URL. For example, if you type samsung.com or http://www.samsung.com, you still go to the Samsung home page. However, there might be some instances when you need to type in “http://” or even “https://” (for a secure web page) at the beginning of the URL. If you do, the Chrome app lets you know so you can type in the “http://” or “https://” in the Address field.
- Tap Chrome on the Home screen.
- In the Welcome to Chrome window, tap Accept & Continue. The next time you open Chrome you won’t see this window on the screen and can proceed to step 4.
- Tap Done in the second page of the window that informs you that if you have bookmarks and other Chrome data stored in your Google account, that information will be synchronized with Chrome on your Tab 4.
- Tap the Address field within the menu bar at the top of the screen. The keyboard opens at the bottom of the screen.
- Start typing a URL, such as samsung.com or play.google.com. You can also select from one of the search sites in the list that appears below the Address field.
- Tap Go on the keyboard when you finish typing.
As you type, terms that match the letter(s) you’ve added appear in the list below the Address field as shown in Figure 2. As you type more letters, Android updates the list to give you what it thinks is a more accurate list of possible terms you’re looking for. You can stop typing at any time and scroll down the list to view the terms and then tap the term to open the web page. For example, as you type the first five letters of “android” (without the quotes), you see that you get terms for android and a number of other results.
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Figure 2. Tap a suggested search term in the list below the Address field to go to the website or a search page that gives you search results for that term.
You can also search deeper within Google itself. For example, if you put a + in front of a search term, you’re telling Google that you require the word in the search results. If you put quotes around a search term (e.g., “android”), you’re telling Google that you want to search for results that contain that term. Scroll to the bottom of the search page and then tap Help to get more information about how you can get the most from your Google searches.
The results display in a Google search results page as shown in Figure 3. Tap any link to go to a page; you can also tap one of the links at the bottom of the screen to view more results within the Related Searches section.
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Figure 3. Text links to web pages as well as other search terms in the Related Searches section are colored blue.
If you look at the top of Google’s search results page shown in Figure 4, you see the links bar so you can search for more than text terms, including Images and Videos. When you click the More link, a pop-up list displays so you can search a variety of other areas within Google.
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Figure 4. The links bar appears just below the menu bar and the More link appears at the right side of the links bar.
Moving around a web page is the same in Chrome as it is in the Internet app:
- As you view a page, you can drag up and down the page with your finger. You can also flick with your finger to scroll quickly. After you flick, the screen scrolls, decelerates, and then comes to a stop.
- Zoom in by double-tapping an area on the screen. Zoom out by double-tapping again. While you’re zoomed in, you can touch and drag left and right to view different parts of the web page.
- Move to another web page from a link in the current web page by tapping a link. Links are usually an underlined or colored piece of text, but they can also be pictures or images that look like buttons.
Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to figure out which parts of a web page are links and which ones aren’t. Back in the early days of the Web, all links were blue and underlined. As web page elements have become more enhanced over time, it’s now more common to find links in any color and any text style. What’s more, graphics that are links aren’t underlined, either.
On a computer’s web browser it’s easy to find out which element is a link when you move the mouse pointer over the link because the pointer changes shape. In Android, there is no cursor, so you can’t find out if a web page element is a link unless you tap it and see what happens.