Top 10 Ways to Speed Up Your Web Browsing

Posted on | November 23, 2008 | No Comments

10. Use Google to read HTML copies of huge documents
Ah, Adobe Acrobat. It’s free and universally used to view documents exactly as they’d print, but few things bottleneck a browsing session like an 8MB PDF file, especially if your browser crashes before showing it. But we can all benefit from Google’s zeal to index everything on Earth. 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. The same holds for PowerPoint presentations, Word 2007 .docx files, and nearly any document you can find in Google search. One of those work-arounds that’s so simple, you’ll be glad when you remember it when you’re trying to jam through that presentation on a terrible hotel Wi-Fi connection.

9. Use TraceMonkey in Firefox 3.1
More and more developers and established web sites are moving their services online and using JavaScript to create interactive web pages these days. So when you’re browsing Flickr, MySpace/Facebook, or nearly anything made by Google, as a few examples, the speed at which your browser runs all the developers’ code can matter a lot. For more responsive pages, it’s hard to beat the mind-blowing speed of TraceMonkey, the new JavaScript engine for Firefox 3.1. Mozilla offers nightly builds of TraceMonkey-enabled Firefox 3.1 (called “Minefield” when you run it, because it can be a bit, well, buggy), but Windows users can also test drive 3.1 without harming their existing Firefox. Of course, depending on who you ask (and which test you run), Google Chrome’s V8 and the brand-new script engine in WebKit, the foundation of Safari, are potentially faster. In any case, your current browser probably isn’t this fast, so taking these speed demons for a test drive can’t hurt.

8. Use Safari or Opera
Look at nearly any web site’s traffic statistics, and Apple’s Safari and the Norse-made Opera browser are just a sliver compared to how many use Internet Explorer and Firefox. In our own browser speed tests, though, we found Opera and Safari to be the champs at loading web pages and rendering JavaScript and CSS templates, respectively. There are lots of reasons to use Firefox (extensions! theming! Greasemonkey!) and Internet Explorer (some sites only work with it!), but if your browser is mainly just a window on the web, consider keeping a copy of Safari, Opera, or the well-rounded Google Chrome on hand for speeding up your site visits.

7. 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, every MP3 on a music blog, or anywhere else you do your downloading. Free Firefox extension DownThemAll, our readers’ favorite download manager, makes it easy to do all those things, or set up smart filters and settings to make any page with tons of files easy to navigate. For a good guide on setting that up, try our tutorial on supercharging your Firefox downloads with DownThemAll.

6. Bump up your cache size (and make other configuration tweaks)
Another set of revelations from living in dial-up land, the 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. Sites that really don’t need graphics to work can be disabled with site-by-site exceptions in Firefox, and these days, any browser can open sites you might need to wait on in a new tab while you keep grooving in another. For getting something done on Google Docs or Zoho, reading feeds in Google Reader, or managing tasks in Remember the Milk, there’s Google’s Gears extension to work offline and connect only when you need to sync your data.

5. Throttle your home wireless network
Your home’s wireless router doesn’t have to be a neutral observer while watching your XBox, BitTorrent downloads, multiple laptops, and other web-connected apps and gear fight it out for a finite amount of bandwidth. Many routers let you negotiate connection rate treaties using Quality of Service settings—and those that don’t can often be made to do so by installing DD-WRT or Tomato. The end result? You can let World of Warcraft run rampant in the evenings, set BitTorrent free in the dead of night, and keep your browser unthrottled during the day. Check out Adam’s guide to ensuring a fast net connection when you need it for the geeky details.

4. Swap heavy sites for RSS feeds and mobile versions
Here’s a not-so-secret tip about your Lifehacker editors—we couldn’t possibly read the full version of every blog, news site, and aggregation site we pull our post material from every day. RSS feeds are this blog’s bread and butter, and they’re great for getting a lot of reading done in a short amount of time. We’re split fairly evenly between the Google Reader webapp and NetNewsWire/NewsGator’s desktop clients, but both are a great way to catch up on your regular web reading 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.

3. Block Flash and/or JavaScript
Our side editor suggested this move after spending a week on a dial-up connection. Firefox users have it easy: 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. If you’re cool with tweaking your router a bit, you can set up universal ad-blocking through it with the Tomato firmware, or use a solution specific to Chrome, on Internet Explorer through the Toggle Flash add-on or IE7Pro plug-in, and even on your iPhone or iPod touch. Lifehacker is, of course, an ad-supported site, and we’d ask that you use such tools only when bandwidth or time are at a serious premium, or for sites that bludgeon you over the head with lowering interest rates, free laptops, and the like.

2. Set up OpenDNS on your browser or router
If you’re a customer of Time Warner, Verizon, or most any commercial internet provider, you’ll occasionally end up at an ad-filled page whenever you typo your way to a non-existent page, and how quickly your browser knows where to find its data depends on their heavily-taxed servers. You can do a lot better with OpenDNS, a free service that can speed up your page connections, open pages from keyword shortcuts, serve as a parental filter, and avoid spam-y “no site here” pages. The service provides detailed how-to instructions for both individual computers and routers, so it’s definitely worth at least a try.

1. Use Secure, Automatic Passwords
Auto-saving, auto-filling passwords have made their way into most every browser, but, by default, they’re only as secure as your ability to keep someone away from your keyboard. If your browser offers a master password option, use it—in Firefox, it’s the only barrier between you and a single button unveiling all your passwords to snoopy friends or nefarious interlopers. Of course, if you’re using the same weak password across all your site logins, you’re just asking to have somebody get into your email, private social messages, and other private data. Using a secure password system can fix that. If you’re using multiple browsers across different systems, you can keep your time-saving password fillers synced with Dropbox, or take care of bookmarks as well with the (Firefox only) Foxmarks.

source : lifehacker

Category: computer

Obama / Osama

Posted on | November 5, 2008 | No Comments

dari yahoo :

WASHINGTON – Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president Tuesday night in a historic triumph that overcame racial barriers as old as America itself.

The son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, the Democratic senator from Illinois sealed his victory by defeating Republican Sen. John McCain in a string of wins in hard-fought battleground states — Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Iowa.

A huge crowd in Grant Park in Chicago erupted in jubilation at the news of Obama’s victory. Some wept.

McCain called his former rival to concede defeat — and the end of his own 10-year quest for the White House. “The American people have spoken, and spoken clearly,” McCain told disappointed supporters in Arizona.

Obama and his running mate, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, will take their oaths of office as president and vice president on Jan. 20, 2009.

As the 44th president, Obama will move into the Oval Office as leader of a country that is almost certainly in recession, and fighting two long wars, one in Iraq, the other in Afghanistan.

The popular vote was close, but not the count in the Electoral College, where it mattered most.

There, Obama’s audacious decision to contest McCain in states that hadn’t gone Democratic in years paid rich dividends.

Obama has said his first order of presidential business will be to tackle the economy. He has also pledged to withdraw most U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months.

Fellow Democrats rode his coattails to larger majorities in both houses of Congress. They defeated incumbent Republicans and won open seats by turn.

The 47-year-old Illinois senator was little known just four years ago. A widely praised speech at the Democratic National Convention, delivered when he was merely a candidate for the Senate, changed that.

Overnight he became a sought-after surrogate campaigner, and he had scarcely settled into his Senate seat when he began preparing for his run for the White House.

A survey of voters leaving polling places on Tuesday showed the economy was by far the top Election Day issue. Six in 10 voters said so, and none of the other top issues — energy, Iraq, terrorism and health care — was picked by more than one in 10.

“May God bless whoever wins tonight,” President Bush told dinner guests at the White House, where his tenure runs out on Jan. 20.

The Democratic leaders of Congress celebrated in Washington.

“It is not a mandate for a party or ideology but a mandate for change,” said Senate Majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

Said Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California: “Tonight the American people have called for a new direction. They have called for change in America.”

Shortly after 11 p.m. in the East, The Associated Press count showed Obama with 338 electoral vote, well over the 270 needed for victory. McCain had 127 after winning states that comprised the normal Republican base.

The nationwide popular vote was remarkably close. Totals from 58 percent of the nation’s precincts showed Obama with 51 percent and McCain with 47.9.

Interviews with voters suggested that almost six in 10 women were backing Obama nationwide, while men leaned his way by a narrow margin. Just over half of whites supported McCain, giving him a slim advantage in a group that Bush carried overwhelmingly in 2004.

The results of the AP survey were based on a preliminary partial sample of nearly 10,000 voters in Election Day polls and in telephone interviews over the past week for early voters.

Democrats also acclaimed Senate successes by former Gov. Mark Warner in Virginia, Rep. Tom Udall in New Mexico and Rep. Mark Udall in Colorado. All won seats left open by Republican retirements.

In New Hampshire, former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen defeated Republican Sen. John Sununu in a rematch of their 2002 race, and Sen. Elizabeth Dole fell to Democrat Kay Hagan in North Carolina.

Democrats also looked for gains in the House. They found their first in Florida, defeating Rep. Tom Feeney, and another in Connecticut, where 22-year veteran Chris Shays was swept away by the Democratic tide.

The resurgent Democrats also elected a governor in one of the nation’s traditional bellwether states when Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon won his race.

Category: general