Much of the handout material is designed to get one started. Many of the URLs will guide the user to introductory information and also provide links to information that hopefully will remain useful on an ongoing basis. Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer are the most popular browsers on the web and have similar features on all of the operating systems for which they are available.
Opera comes close, using far fewer resources.
Both products feature HTML 3.2, Java, JavaScript, various extensions that may or may not work with other browsers, and a suite of additional applications for conferencing, reading newsgroups, receiving and sending e-mail and so on. Topics include what file extensions mean, file compression to speed downloading, risk of computer virus infection, etc. The following link takes you to a chapter on e-mail in a booklet about the net by the computer science dept. That message gets distributed all over the world. Listserves are automated e-mail based information groups.