Do you ever wonder how much time you spend browsing the Web? Take a look at these browsing tips to make your browsing online more efficient.

I certainly spend a lot of time on it, in fact my second job requires me to always be on the web. You’ll notice I don’t use the term Internet to refer to the World Wide Web as they are two different things although they are used synonymously in most cases. In short the World Wide Web is one of the things that reside on the Internet along with other things such as email etc.

Back to the topic, I find myself spending a lot of time on the Web searching, reading, getting ideas, learning, checking my email and lot of other things, my background is Computing and I.T so I tend to be quite efficient when using browsers to browse the web, you’ll know what I mean in a moment.

I find my colleagues spending extra clicks for no reason, yes I know it’s only a few clicks but trust me it all adds up if you know how to save clicks on the mouse, after all why would you click those extra times if you don’t need to?

So I’ve gathered a few browsing tips so that it educates regular users and makes your web browsing a lot quicker and efficient.

Quick Web Browsing Tips

1. On the search results page there’s no need to double-click on the hyperlinks or any hyperlink for that matter. This means that a single click on a hyperlink will work. Try it.

2. If you want to search a for a term that you can see on the page in front of you, just highlight the text with your mouse and right-click to bring up the menu and then just click on ‘search for term’. That will save you from manually opening a new tab/window on your browser then typing the term and finally hitting the enter button. This works on all modern browsers including Internet Explorer 9.

3. Once you have your search results isn’t it frustrating to click on a link only to find it’s not what you are looking for? And then you may have to either press back enough times to get back to your initial search results or redo the search. Well you could right-click on the hyperlink and then open in a new tab or window, or better to CTRL + Click on a link. This will open the link for you in a new tab, leaving your original results intact so that if you don’t find what you are looking for in the first link then you don’t have to press back or whatever it is that you do.

4. CTRL + C, CTRL + T, CTRL + V and Enter. If you find links that are not hyperlinked i.e. you can’t click on it then highlight URL followed by CTRL + C to copy then CTRL + T to open a new tab in your browser and then CTRL + V to paste and finally press enter to make the call. Yes sounds like a lot but I’ve just saved you a lot of clicks.

5. Some people always think that they have to go to the homepage of their favourite search engine and then do the search! Most modern browsers have a search bar on the right hand side of the address bar, why not just use that to search using your search engine? It will save you from opening up a new page with your search engines homepage then performing the search.

6. Do you use the URL bar to directly to enter your website addresses? Do you know the short cut to go to the URL/address bar of your browser without using the mouse? On a Windows PC just hit F6 or CTRL+L or ALT+D to highlight the current address which you can replace with your desired destination by typing the new address. On a Mac you need to use Command+L to get to the address bar of your browser.

7. Some users type by looking at the keyboard without noticing that, once you have typed a single letter in the search box, the search engines start to suggest words for you automatically thus saving you time. But if you aren’t looking at the screen then you won’t know that this has happened. Similarly on the address bar of your browsers if start typing you will see that it starts to suggest to you sites that you have visited and bookmarks. So if you have previously been to this website or have it bookmarked you can just start typing the first few letters and it should show you the address you are looking for. Try this tip with number seven to save even more time!

8. Your address bar also works as a search box. So you can insert your search terms in there as well to use your favourite search engine.

9. Use tabs not windows this means you wont have lots of windows open at the same time, you will only have a window but all tabbed, previously I told you that you can open a new tab by clicking on CTRL+T. To switch between tabs you can use CTRL+TAB. Try it!

10. If you need to go a domain directly you can use the address bar, but if it is a .com domain e.g. example.com you do not have to type example.com you can just enter example and the CTRL+ENTER this will add the .com suffix automatically for you.

So there you have it 10 browsing tips to make your online browsing a lot more efficient and saving you more clicks on the mouse.

Have you got any browsing tips that you use and would like to share? Leave your comments and thank you for reading.