With the World Wide Web, downloading files is as simple as a click of your mouse. Typically, downloading refers to the method by which you access and save software or other files to your computer from a remote computer. As it turns out, everything you do on the web is some form of a download. For instance, whenever you view a web page, the page and associated pictures are downloaded to your computer. The browser determines the type of file you downloaded by using the file extension (the characters following the "."). If it knows about this type of file, it will display it.

So, what's the difference when you download software? None, really. The browser will look at the file extension, and if it doesn't recognize it, it will ask you if you want to configure a viewer (tell the browser about this type of file), or save the file to disk. In this case, you would save to disk.

There is an easier way to download files to your computer. Click on the link to the file with your right mouse button, select Hypertext Link, then Save to Disk.

More often than not, you will be downloading files that have been compressed. These may be individual files or groups of files that have been compressed into one file to save downloading time and disk space. If the files you download have been compressed then you generally need a separate software utility to decompress them. The exception being files with a .sea (Macintosh) or .exe (DOS/Windows) extension which are self-extracting. That means they do not require a separate piece of software to run. Because many of the files you download will take time to be transferred to your computer, you will want to save yourself the headache of discovering, after the fact, that you downloaded a file that won't work on your computer. How can you know if it will or won't? See the Essential Internet article about file formats and extensions for more information on file extensions and what you need to interpret them.

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