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Engineer Your Web Browser
By JD Bluefield | April 20, 2008
First, make your browser safer. If you’re using Internet Explorer (a.k.a. IE), switch immediately to Mozilla FireFox. Why? FireFox is faster and safer than the IE.
FireFox’s Interface is much simpler and less cluttered. Enough said.
Block ALL Pop-ups! No programs to download or spam-blockers, its already built into FireFox.
- Go to “Tools”, “Options”, “Contents”, and check-off the “Block Pop-up Windows” block. Done! No more pop-ups.
Open pages in new tab instead of new windows. Rather than open pages in new windows, filling your screen to no end, open them in tabs.
- Go to “Tools”, “Options”, “Tabs”, and check-off to open new pages in “a new tab”. Tabs work just like the tabs on a folder, and keep pages tidy in one window.
- To shuffle through the tabs without hitting your mouse, hit “Ctrl” + “Tab”.
Use Add-ons to work faster. FireFox has “add-on” which can make it run faster and more efficiently for you. There are a multitude of add-ons for various functions, but here are two examples of Add-ons I use, with a short description quoted from the site:
- Download Statusbar: “View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar - without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing.”
- PDF Download:”PDF Download relieves the pain experienced when encountering PDF files on the Web. Whenever you click on a PDF file, PDF Download lets you know before trying to open it, and then offers you choices such as downloading, opening, or converting it straight to HTML.”
Clean up your links. First get rid of all those links that come with the computer. They’re practically useless. Now, place your most heavily used links in the “Bookmarks Toolbar”, located directly below the address field. To fit as many links as you can, delete all that crap at the end and shorten the name as much as possible. (To be fair though, these long descriptions are automatically generated by the web browsers.)
Honestly, the full title is not necessary. Most sites also have an icon so you can quickly recognize it. BluefieldMoney.com’s icon is the dollar bill symbol in the blue sphere or “field”.
If you don’t see this icon, it appears after the first time you click the link. So bookmark this page and then click the link to refresh this screen and you’ll see what I mean.
Organize your links in folders. I literally have hundreds of links. Scanning through all of them to find what I want is a ridiculous waste of time. Make folders with sub-folders that you can easily scan through to get exactly what you want. For example I have a “Finances” folder with less accessed reference links in “Gold”, “Stocks”, and “Home” sub-folders.
Topics: Engineered Living |
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