7 Tips to Speed Up Your Web Browsing

No matter how much time, money and energy you put into ensuring that your home internet connection is as fast as it can possibly be, you will inevitably be somewhere with a snail-speed connection when you need it the most. In college, our 20-page final research paper was finished—phew!—so we submitted it and made our way out of town for Christmas. The next day, in the middle of rural Florida, we were stuck with the awful task of having to re-submit our paper, which our professor warned was lost, with the lacking bandwidth of a small county library. Not fun. But take a chance to learn from our misfortunes and memorize these tips to an instantly faster Web browsing session...

Use Google to read HTML copies of huge documents: If you've got a Google Docs or Gmail account, uploading or emailing a PDF gives you an option to view its as an HTML, which is going to come through a lot faster than viewing the same PDF in Adobe Acrobat. The same holds for PowerPoint presentations, Word 2007 .docx files, and nearly any document you can find in Google search.
Use Safari or Opera: Look at nearly any web site's traffic statistics, and the numbers of users surfing with Apple's Safari and the Opera browser's are minuscule compared to Internet Explorer and Firefox, making Opera and Safari the champs at loading web pages and rendering JavaScript and CSS templates.
Make Faster, Fool-Proof Downloads with Down Them All: Right-clicking a picture or link, selecting "Save Link As," choosing a download spot—it gets real old, real fast, especially if you try to do it on every picture in a Flickr set. Free Firefox extension DownThemAll makes it easy, or you can set up smart filters and settings to make any page with tons of files easy to navigate.
Bump up your cache size (and make other configuration tweaks): Configuration options that you'd normally never touch are serious life-savers if you're on weak Wi-Fi, an older, slower system, or just tired of watching your mouse cursor do it's "waiting" animation over and over. Upping your cache size definitely speeds up your back button action and speeds up repetitive banners and graphics.
Throttle your home wireless network: Your wireless router doesn't have to be a neutral observer while watching all your web-connected apps and gadgets fight it out for bandwidth. Many routers let you negotiate connection rate treaties using Quality of Service settings.
Swap heavy sites for RSS feeds and mobile versions: RSS feeds are great for getting a lot of reading done in a short amount of time with a minimum of bandwidth, or no connection whatsoever. Along those lines, you can run any site that's chock full of text-y news through the Google Mobilizer for a version that's fast enough for a mobile phone, and very fast on a desktop.
Block Flash and/or JavaScript: For Firefox users, install the Adblock Plus and Flashblock extensions, and sites bogged down mostly by unnecessary Flash and huge display ads will come through a lot quicker.

[ Adapted from Lifehacker.com ][ Image from Laffy4k@Flickr ]

I don't understand the logic of the second tip.

posted by Joan A. on November 24th 2008 at 9:31am
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I second the confusion about the correlation between less popular and being faster.

...it's also interesting how the article recommends blocking its own ads (the last bullet).

posted by happiness on November 24th 2008 at 12:51pm
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Yeah, your browser is usually on your computer, so it really doesn't matter how many other people out there in the world are using it as well. It's not a website with bandwidth problems, it's a computer program! And websites don't parcel out information in set sizes to each browser. If Safari and Opera load certain things faster, it's just because it's designed that way.

posted by Kaete on November 25th 2008 at 7:52am
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I L-O-V-E Opera.

Two reasons:
1. It is faster than the competition in my experience (I've used Opera for years as my primary browser and tried all the others from time to time when a site didn't work right in Opera).

2. There are dozens of thoughtful little features built into Opera that make browsing faster, easier, and more powerful. Sure many of these can be added to Firefox with extensions, but then you get a bloated piece of software and extension problems and conflicts that take forever to diagnose and fix.

Some of my favorite features are:

- mouse gestures (right-click and swipe left to go back, for instance);

- customizable toolbars (my tabs and buttons are on the bottom);

- user-definable key combinations (I like ctrl t for a new tab instead of shift ctrl t), and they can be applied to any function (by default z is the same as the back button, and I go nuts in Safari when it doesn't do that);

- smart contextual menu (right-click) items like 'copy link address,' 'copy page address,' 'open in background tab/window,' 'save linked content as,' 'open image,' 'copy image address,' 'save to download folder,' etc. They’re great for grabbing a picture link that I want to email to myself at home, and then using that link to download an AT picture for my inspiration file;

- page zoom: in and out in 10% increments via ctrl scroll wheel or with a dropdown menu, up to 1000%;

- search within address bar: typing 'g apartment therapy' does a Google search on 'apartment therapy.' Typing 'w apartment therapy' searches Wikipedia. If you want to search a site that doesn't have a built-in shortcut, you can define your own;

- spell check in any text box (perfect for long-winded comments on AT!).

There are a ton more features I don't use on a daily basis, but these are the ones that are essential to me. Opera has been ahead of the pack with features for years and I'm spoiled.

One caveat: because of the low market share for Opera most developers don't test their site design for it. Unlike IE, Opera is standards-compliant, but there are occasionally sites (I have a few intranet ones at work, also CW TV’s streaming video player for Gossip Girl) that don't play well with Opera, so I have to use IE or Safari.

posted by jeffzelli on November 25th 2008 at 5:27pm
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