How many hours has it been now?

Am I waiting for my browser

or is it waiting for me?

Illustration: Nils

Begin Better Browsing

Want to learn something new today? How about some browsing-skills?

This is just my recipe for quick, awesome browsing. My suggestions may or may not already be in your repertoire of awesome web skills, so please be overbearing if this is simple stuff.

Level 1: That Pesky News Site

Just do as your told and I’ll explain why you did it later. Trust me. These techniques should/could work for most browsers, but I’ll be basing myself on Firefox which you can get here if you don’t have it.

1. Enter a site where you like to get your news.
2. Start scrolling downwards, and when you spot some news you’d like to read hold the keyboard key [ctrl] and left click on the desired article. This will open a tab containing your desired news article.
3. Repeat previous procedure until you have enough news.
4. Now press [ctrl] + [tab] to start going rightwards through your loaded tabs.
   [ctrl] + [shift] + [tab] can be a finger twister, but lets you move leftwards through the tabs.
5. After you’re done reading an article press [ctrl] + [F4] do delete the tab.

Why are we doing this? Just clock how long it takes to load that news site.  Diving into one article at a time and reloading the main page each time you want to fetch a new article takes too long, don’t you agree?

Another argument is that performing these tricks on a laptop gives you happy fingers, because they have to travel less on that blasted touchpad. Rub no more my dear reader!

Make life easier on your fingers. CC: ikeX

Level 2: Another (useful) habit

When I’m on the internet I’m there to accomplish various tasks. Read news, get resources, check my facebook etc. Naturally I use tabbed browsing in these tasks, but I group the tasks in separate windows. This avoids intermingling your tabs with each other.

Say you’re researching old school table cloths and you’re prowling through numerous sites which you’ve never seen before. That’s the situation, and you don’t know what lies beyond each link on those sites.

You encounter a massive site that “may” have the info you want, open it in a separate window and bust out your awesome skills you learned in Level 1 (above) and proceed to make tabs out of whatever links you’re interested in. [Ctrl] + [Left-Click] (On the link)

"When in doubt use the (s)tabbing-technique" CC:Greg-Turner

While you’re waiting for those tabs to load you can either check your favorite social networking site, or open another site in a different window and proceed to make tabs out of it.

As you come across sites with no good info, just close that window with its tabs and keep on truckin’ until you have the desired info. Congratulations,  you’ve cleared level 2.

Level 3: A clean exit

You’ve been up browsing “the interwebs” way past your bedtime, and your eyelids are falling down like waterfalls. What will you do about your awesome windows and tabs? Will you keep your computer on, and hope there’s not a power shortage? What about the carbon footprint? Well, here’s a couple tricks for this.

ReadItLater is an add-on for Firefox that let’s you take all of those bookmarks that you just want to read once, and group them together instead of letting them clog up your list of your other more frequently used bookmarks.

In Firefox you can find a menu overhead in Tools –> Options –> Main. In this little window you can set “show my windows and my tabs from last time.” The last window you close will be the window you get when you fire up Firefox again. Just play around with it before sticking to it, I don’t want to mess up anyone’s day. It’s a great alternative to painstakingly bookmarking everything before shutting down your computer or not shutting of your computer. Ever.

Did you leave your pc on? CC: Woodleywonderworks

Last, but not least. Would you care to share your secret web techniques? Well, please leave a comment below.