Not revolutionary at all and quite commonly used but hopefully a decent summery about MUST DO’s for convenience when browsing. Hopefully some points will be of interest for most people.

1) Use the Firefox web browser

I guess most of people finding this blog already use Firefox but if you don’t I recommend to change asap. The reasons are as follows

• Its available for Windows, Linux and Mac and now we are only waiting for the mobile version
• It simply feels faster and more reliable than most other browsers
• And most importantly, it has great extensions/plugins which I could not live without.

If you really like opera better its okay too but then it has to be the 9,5 beta version with synchronization built in. But it is difficult so far for example for all you Ubuntu users since it is difficult to install the beta version.

2) Arrange your top 20 bookmarks perfectly in the browsers toolbar

Since I started to do this web browsing is much faster. In Firefox you simply put your most commonly used bookmarks in the “toolbar folder” in bookmarks and instantly the appear in the toolbar. It is very important to keep the names as short as possible so that you can fit as many as 10-20. See below picture.

3) Organize your bookmarks once and for all.

I really mean it. Organize it NOW and your life will be much easier. And I can hear you scream, “why, next time I change computer all work will be undone”. But you couldn’t be more wrong. In item 4 below I will tell you how this work can be of persistent character.

So now you take your time and organize it well. You should use folders and even subfolders if you have many bookmarks. Also try to put the most commonly used folders in the top. This is how my bookmarks are arranged.

4) Synchronize your bookmarks between your computers.

This is a absolute must today and if you still don’t for this, strongly consider to start. There are dozens way to do it, a few easy ways and some are really geeky and difficult. I will tell you about one of the best sollutions.

Install Foxmarks bookmarks synchronizer. Foxmarks is a plugin for Firefox and you can install and read more about the plugin here. After you installed and run it on all your computers (Firefox only) your life just became so much easier. If you add a bookmark somewhere, just sync up and you will have it in the other computers as well. You will also have no problems when you reinstall your Linux.

For Firefox 3 beta users you will find that foxmarks is not compatible yet. However, you can go to beta.foxmarks.com and sign up to the beta program which works with FF 3 beta quite flawlessly. They accept all users at this moment if I understood it correctly. Btw, I guess they will probably soon release a stable version for FF3 beta.

5) Start read your blogs, tech sites etc in Google reader (or other good rss reader program or site)

I have about 15 sites I like to browse over and make sure I don’t miss anything about. It includes a few blogs, some tech sites, some special digg categories etc. I have since a year or so, since I started to use Google reader, been able to follow the content on all these sites, by visiting ONLY Google reader. I have been doing that without missing the subject of a single article and it has at the same time saved me a LOT of time.

If you don’t know much about rss, don’t care, its super easy and you will find out soon. You can try it out as follows (takes 3 minutes)

a) Find a site which has RSS functions. Most blogs use it including this one. You can click on the RSS icon to the right in the web address field in the browser.

b) Copy the address

c) Sign up to Google Reader, click on add subscription and paste the address. Do this step for all your favorite sites.

d) Visit Google reader regularly and enjoy. Google reader has good pages also for your mobile phone, visit Google reader from your mobile typing in google.com/reader/m

6) Use iGoogle as your start page.

It is best for those with gmail accounts. You will get a instant view of your email, your google reader, calendar, weather, stock etc etc. iGoogle is easy to use and of course you use your normal Google account for the service. So input www.google.com/i as start page in the settings, configure iGoogle and your done.

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