How I browse: Part 1

Now I surf the Internet quite a lot (I’m a geek) and I’ve set up my computer so that I can do stuff faster and more efficiently. So since I’m bored I thought I’d share a few things I’ve discovered/use to make my life easier and maybe they’ll make your life on the internet a bit less hassle too!

I’m just gonna cover the web browser in this post, I’ll share a few of my favourite web sites in another post.

So then. The web browser… Firstly, ditch Internet Explorer, it is woefully bad! Instead, go here and get Firefox. Firefox is much easier to use and has so many great, great features that it makes Internet Explorer look like one of the most pointless things ever! Here’s a mini rundown of some it’s key features:

• Two words: tabbed browsing. Such a simple idea, but so so useful!! No longer will you have to have 6 or 7 IE windows open, firefox uses tabs across the top to make it easier to flick between different open web sites.
• It is safer to use than IE (it doesn’t download Active-X scripts which people can use to hack into your computer). So less chance of getting viruses, spyware, etc…
• Firefox is known to be faster to run than IE, so you’ll have fewer moments were your computer hangs.
• Extensions! These are the most useful feature of Firefox. You can now add in extra functionality easily. I’ll discuss these below because there thousands of them available, but there’s a few essential ones I think people should have
• Search engines. In the top right hand corner is a search engine box, where you can select a search engines or site, eg. google, amazon, wikipedia, etc… and search it without first having to go to the website (It’s little things like this that make firefox easier to use)
• Live bookmarks. These are essentially links to RSS or Atom feeds so that you can get the latest news/posts from a blog or whatever in your browser without having to go to the website

There are plenty of other features (lots of stuff for web developers, like javascript console – a godsend!) but I shall let people discover those as they go.

Extensions

Once you have Firefox, you should get some of the extensions for it. There are 3 or 4 main ones that I use (plus a few others for designing web stuff, but I won’t mention them):

1. First up get Adblock and the Adblock Filterset.G extensions (make sure you install Adblock first, then Filterset.G). Adblock can make downloading webpages faster and also makes them less cluttered by (you’ve guessed it) not downloading adverts! The Filterset.G plugin contains a list of known adverts that should be blocked (once you’ve installed it, you may need to update it, I’ll talk thru this in a moment because you have to restart firefox when you install an extension (probably the only downside), so it’s better to install the extensions first, then restart and configure them.)
2. The next extension to get is customizeGoogle. Infact, you should only get this if you use google (which most people do) It basically adds links on the google results to page to perform the same search in other search engines (yahoo, msn, etc). It can also block google ads down the side and you can tell it to exclude certain websites from all your searches (for example, i exclude expertsexchange.com because it is the most frustrating search result i get – it has answers to my programming problems, but I have to pay to access them! Therefore I never ever want to see it in my results page)
3. Next up add greasemonkey. I shall talk about this another time, because there are some really cool things you can do with it (for example, fed up of logging into a page that already has your login details filled in on it? write a 2 line greasemonkey script that skips that page and logs you straight in!)
4. I also recommend getting IE tab. Unfortunately, some websites will only work in IE, namely microsoft update (because it requires active-X controls). This extension allows you to have a tab as an Internet Explorer window. You can also configure it so that everytime you visit certain pages they will always load up in the IE tab.

There’s a few other extensions I use aswell which people may find useful:

• Fasterfox is an excellent plugin for speeding up firefox even more! You can set it so that while you have nothing downloading, the browser will automatically start downloading all the pages that are linked on the current page, so that when you click a link, it will show instaneously (cos you’ve already downloaded it! It will also prevent sneaky code that loads pop-ups which most pop-up stoppers miss.
• FoxyTunes is also a very handy new one I’ve found recently. It allows you to control your music player (windows media player, winamp, etc) from the firefox window and takes up hardly any space!!
• del.icio.us is also a fantastically useful extension if you use del.icio.us (which I’ll talk about in another post).

That’s a fair bit to get through, so I’ll finish up there. Next time I’ll discuss some very useful websites, inparticular netvibes.com and delicious.com (plus a few others) so if you feel like a having a peek at them, go for it, but I’ll write more about them and a few others another time.