Simple Tips for Super Fast Web Browsing

Leo Babauta of Zen­Hab­its gives us a list of the best way to have super fast web brows­ing. And it’s not about adding on to the inter­net, it’s about unclut­ter­ing and min­i­mal­ism so that you can do what you really want to do with­out all the clut­ter and the bells and whistles:

I thought I’d share some of my tricks for the masses, in hopes that it’ll be of some use.

First, under­stand that every­one has their own per­sonal style of brows­ing, and I don’t think you should adopt every tip below. This is what works for me. You prob­a­bly won’t like it as much.

Sec­ond, under­stand that my phi­los­o­phy is one of min­i­mal­ism: I don’t like a lot of bells, whis­tles or dis­trac­tions, and I like fast, light­weight pro­grams that aren’t bloated or slow. I also like to work quickly, using the key­board mostly, so that I can get my work done with­out friction.

So here are my tips — some of these will be old hat for web vet­er­ans, but they bear repeating.

Use a fast, min­i­mal browser. First, if you’re using Inter­net Explorer and you don’t absolutely have to, please do your­self a favor and switch right now. It’s bloated and slow, inse­cure, and doesn’t ren­der the web cor­rectly. If you can’t switch, please start edu­cat­ing your IT or HR depart­ment about mod­ern, standards-compliant browsers. Sec­ond, I’ve long been a fan of Fire­fox because it’s gen­er­ally awe­some and exten­si­ble, but lately I’ve switched to faster and lighter browsers that do what I need with a min­i­mum of bloat. So on the Mac, that’s been Opera and lately Camino. Both are great and do what I need. On the PC, there’s no con­test — it’s Google Chrome, as it’s the fastest I’ve tried.

Use tabs, not win­dows. This should be obvi­ous but many peo­ple still open a new win­dow each time they’re going to a new site (includ­ing my mom). Instead, con­fig­ure your browser to open new tabs instead of win­dows. When you are read­ing a post, for exam­ple, and want to open a link in a new win­dow, Command-click (on a Mac) or middle-click (on a PC) should open the link in a new tab. Now you can switch between tabs with­out need­ing to find where each win­dow went.

Learn key­board short­cuts. Again, this is obvi­ous to most web mon­keys, but it’s so much faster that you need to take the time to learn the short­cuts. Some com­mon exam­ples (using Mac short­cuts): Cmd-T to open a new tab, Cmd-L to go to the browser’s loca­tion bar (to enter an url), Cmd-D or Cmd-K (depend­ing on the browser) to book­mark, Cmd-K (on some browsers) to go to the search engine box (the Google box), Cmd-W to close a win­dow or tab, and so on. Each browser and OS have dif­fer­ent short­cuts, but you can eas­ily learn them by look­ing at the short­cuts in the menus of the browser. It just takes a few min­utes to learn them, and then you’re golden.

Set up key­word book­marks and speed dial. Most browsers have key­word book­marks, and it takes just a few sec­onds to set up each one. Basi­cally, for all of your com­mon sites, you’ll want to cre­ate a book­mark, and then go to the book­mark and enter a key­word for quick access to that book­mark. To do this, go the the Prop­er­ties of the book­mark and set the key­word. I rec­om­mend short key­words — com­mon ones for me include “gm” for Gmail, “rd” for Google Reader, “cal” for Google Cal­en­dar, “bog” for my bank web­site, “tw” for Twit­ter, “st” for my blog’s stats, “post” to cre­ate a new Zen Habits post, and so on. Speed Dial is an Opera fea­ture that other browsers seem to be copy­ing — you set up your 9 most oft-used web­sites into Speed Dial, and then can go to any of them with the press of a key (i.e. Cmd-1 for Gmail, Cmd-2 for Twit­ter, etc.).

Set up key­word searches. Same as above, but these are saved searches you might per­form com­monly besides a reg­u­lar Google web search. Exam­ples might include Ama­zon, Wikipedia, Wik­tionary, IMDB, Ebay, and Flickr searches. For each saved search, you’ll have a key­word, and then you can just search from the loca­tion bar (Cmd-L to get there) — for exam­ple, “im alyssa milano” will search IMDB​.com for Alyssa Milano (once you set it up of course).

Set up key­word book­marklets. In Fire­fox and a cou­ple other browsers, there’s the abil­ity to cre­ate javascript book­marklets that have some kind of func­tion­al­ity — for exam­ple, a book­marklet for Tum­blr (to cre­ate a new post from the page you’re read­ing) or Instapa­per (to book­mark an arti­cle for read­ing later) or Twit­ter (to tweet a page) or is​.gd (to cre­ate a short url for a page), and so on (some good exam­ples). Other browsers (Opera is an exam­ple) don’t allow you to drag and drop a book­marklet into the book­marks tool­bar, but you can still cre­ate them: 1) cre­ate a reg­u­lar book­mark , 2) copy the link url of the book­marklet using Control-click or right-click, 3) paste this url into the reg­u­lar book­mark in your book­mark man­ager (Cmd-B in Camino), and then cre­ate a key­word for this book­mark. Now, if I want to cre­ate a short url for a page, I go to the page, press Cmd-L (to go to the loca­tion bar) and type “is” and press enter — and instantly have a short url. This works for any javascript bookmarklet.

Fast online book­mark­ing. Beyond cre­at­ing key­word book­marks for com­mon sites, searches and book­marklets, I like to book­mark resources and pages to be read later using online tools. In the past I used Deli­cious (for book­mark­ing resources) and Instapa­per (for read­ing some­thing later), but these days I use Pin­board (by the writer of the excel­lent blog, Idle Words). It’s in beta, but it’s fast, and has both book­mark­ing and to-read fea­tures. Using a ser­vice like this allows me to access my book­marks from any computer.

Block Flash. Adobe’s Flash for­mat is every­where on the web these days — pop­u­lar sites like YouTube depend on it for video, and you’ll find it in ads every­where, and some entire sites are built on Flash. It’s annoy­ing, frankly. Flash is slow, and I pre­fer to turn it off by default … but have the option to turn it on if I want to watch a YouTube video or some­thing. In Camino, it’s sim­ple — just turn it off in the pref­er­ences. In other browsers, you might need a plu­gin or exten­sion to turn off Flash but give your­self the abil­ity to turn on Flash ele­ments with a click.

Distraction-free read­ing and videos. I love read­ing with­out the dis­trac­tion and clut­ter of most sites. So I use two book­marklets: Read­abil­ity for read­ing arti­cles, and Qui­etube for view­ing videos.

Turn off most exten­sions. Fire­fox is great for all its amaz­ing exten­sions, but if you use a lot of them they can cause the browser to get slow and bloated, and often buggy. So when I do use Fire­fox I turn off almost all exten­sions (except Google Gears for offline access), and on Camino I use none. It makes for much faster browsing.

Don’t have a mil­lion tabs open. This is a com­mon web-surfing mode for a lot of peo­ple, but it slows down the browser. I tend to open lots of tabs at times, but when things get too clut­tered I book­mark them for later read­ing (using Pin­board) and then close the tabs, so I have only two or three open at any time.

Clear most of your tool­bars. I like min­i­mal tool­bars, so I turn most of them off on the browser and remove most but­tons, so the con­tent is all there is.

1password or KeeP­ass. Good tools for eas­ily stor­ing all your pass­words — oth­er­wise, you’ll either have to remem­ber them all or use the same ones over and over (not very secure).

Tun­ing out the Inter­net. When I need to do seri­ous work, I try to remove dis­trac­tions by clos­ing the browser to do actual work. If I find myself open­ing the browser too much, I’ll use a util­ity (such as Free­dom) to shut off the Inter­net altogether.