Productivity Series: Web Browsers

See what techniques I use to be more productive when browsing the web. I use no extensions, minimal bookmarks and tabs, and try not to overcomplicate things.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how I use web browsers on my Mac. 
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So this is part of my Productivity Series where I show you how I use my Mac and maybe you can get some tips from the things that I do. So let's take a look at how I browse the web. It's definitely different than how a lot of other people do it.
So the first thing is that I use Safari as my main web browser. I use it full screen. So in Mission Control here you can see I've got my Desktop and then I have Safari in a full screen space. Now one of the main productivity tools in Safari is Bookmarks. I don't really use Bookmarks with one big exception. I find bookmarks to be counterproductive. Saving and managing large amounts of bookmarks just takes up a lot of time. If I find something interesting that I may want to go back to later it's usually easy to search the web and come up with it again. So I try not to save things as bookmarks and I don't use Reading List either. That's for reading articles and that's kind of counterproductive to spend a lot of time during the workday reading articles, saving an article to read it later, that's not a good idea. If it's worth reading I read it right there and then.
Where I do use Bookmarks is Favorites and the Favorites Bar. So you can see I have the Favorites Bar turned on and I have various folders here. So I have basically a set of bookmarks. These are all saved in the Favorites Folder. I have them arranged in things that make logical sense for me. So, for instance, I have a set of things that have to do with MacMost. I have some business things, some tech, you know, server things, local things. That's my arrangement here. You could see them here if you go to Bookmarks, Edit Bookmarks. I could see I just have Favorites and there are the folders and they are easy to create and maintain in here in Edit Bookmarks. But then I use them up here. This is how I access them. I rarely if ever use the Sidebar here for showing Bookmarks or really anything in the Sidebar.
So if I don't use Bookmarks what exactly are these? Well, they fall into three categories. The first category are things that I'm not going to find by searching because they are very specific to me. Like log-ons to my specific accounts and things like that. I'm not going to be able to find those in a search. They are special pages that I go to on my Servers. Second, I've got pages that you won't find easily in a search but I do access them frequently. Like once a day. So, for instance, I may have a link directly to the local weather pages that I like. If I search I'm going to come up with all sorts of weather pages. The information is there. But I like this particular page. The third category are actually things where I'm not using the Bookmarks so I can easily go there. I'm using the Bookmark as a reminder. So these might be, say, communities that I belong to that I want to remember every once in awhile to go check out. Or maybe some particular articles or lists that help me with business but they are not the sort of information I could retain in my head all the time. So I like to go and review them every once in awhile. I won't remember to do that unless I put them in a Folder that reminds me to every once in awhile when I have some extra time go and check these out. 
Now, of course, this is my demo account. Not my real account. That's why I have just basically recreated it using web addresses than what I do in my real account.
I don't really use the Start Page either. I wasn't really sure why I didn't until I actually started to make this video. I realized that if I go to the Start Page I see my Favorites here. This should be an easy way to actually dig down and get to the page that I want. But it's actually one more step than just choosing it here in the Favorites Bar. I don't really need this because I have this.
But another tool that I like to use that I think a lot of people don't take advantage of is History. So you go into History here. I go to Show All History. I have it set to remember every page and only delete manually. So the history goes way back. This is really useful because you can search History. So if I'm looking for a webpage and I know I've been to it already I don't need to search the web. I can actually go into my history and search history to come up with it.
Now about the new stuff in macOS Monterey. I'm opting to use the new compact Tab Bar here because it seems to make sense. I saves a lot of space and it's just a matter of getting used to it. All the functionality is there and that's what I mostly care about. I don't however use Tab Groups because I don't like to keep tabs open. I don't want to have a lot of webpages open. If maybe I'm researching something and doing a lot of work I may then go above five or six or seven tabs. But when I'm done with tabs I tend to close those tabs and have basically almost nothing going on or maybe one or two tabs open at a time. So having Tab Groups, especially switching between different sets of tabs, to me seems counterproductive to have all of that. But that's just the way I work.
Now how about browser extensions. Well, if you look in my Browser Extensions here you'll see I've got basically nothing. This is my demo account so these are both turned Off. But usually I'd want Password turned On so I can access my passwords there. Now I use both the Safari passwords and OnePassword. I've been using OnePassword long before Safari had the ability to Save passwords. Now I happily use both. When I create a new account somewhere it saves to both places so it's not really that big of an inconvenience to use them and I kind of like having my passwords in two places just in case. So that will be one extension I'll have on. This extension isn't even one I want but it comes with Parallel so the only way to get rid of it is uninstalling Parallel so you can see I have it disabled. I don't have any other extensions installed. I definitely don't have an ad blockers installed. I practice what I preach. I tell people that they shouldn't use ad blockers because they are taking money away from content creators and they are. I don't use ad blockers primarily for that reason.
But another thing I do for productivity is I actually pay for YouTube Premium. It's ten bucks a month but unlike spending that money on something like Netflix that takes away productivity, paying for YouTube Premium actually increases productivity because I don't have to watch ads when I'm looking around on YouTube. So it's saving me 10, 15, 20 minutes a week by paying that ten dollars a month. Rarely do you find an opportunity to pay a little bit of money and actually give yourself more time. Plus I know that when I view videos from creators I like they are going to get some of that money. So I'm directly paying the creators for their efforts.
Now that said I do use one other browser. That's Goggle Chrome. I use it for something very specific. Since I have to maintain a YouTube site of course I need to be logged into Goggle. I'm locked into Goggle on Goggle Chrome. Might as well do it on Chrome since it's the Goggle browser. I know YouTube is going to work its absolute best there. So, when I need to take care of my YouTube account I just switch to Chrome and that's all I use Chrome for. Basically going into YouTube, answering comments, uploading videos, things like that. I have a pretty big extension that I use that actually assists me with YouTube. There are several of those things out there and I have that just installed in Chrome. It's not installed in Safari. So it's not causing any issues in Safari. It's only there when I'm looking at my YouTube account which is only when I'm in Chrome.
So there's a whole bunch of ways that I could try to be more productive when using web browsers on my Mac. Ask me any questions you'd like. If you have any productivity tips for searching the web let me know in the comments below.

Comments: 11 Responses to “Productivity Series: Web Browsers”

Russ Winkler

3 years ago

Thanks for the productivity tips with Safari. I originally had Safari remove history after one month. I'm now going to change it to manually remove history. like you mentioned. So, I want to ask you how to recover deleted Safari history, so I can search Safari history more in the past. Is this possible?

Gary Rosenzweig

Russ: No way to do that. If you deleted the past history it is gone.

Eric

Have you considered moving away from 1Password now that it is changing from being a native macOS app?

Eric: I use both. Why not? It is so easy to store new passwords in both (it just prompts you).

Alston Ray

Thank you for these great tips, Gary. I use Chrome or Firefox for maps as the trackpad is virtually unmanageable in Safari... I wonder whether Apple will fix that one day.

Bill

Hi Gary, correct me if I'm wrong but you don't use an ad blocker because you don't want to keep money away from contents makers but you pay Google ( Youtube) a certain amount every months to keep the ads away.

How does that help the contents makers?

Bill: The content makers get a cut of that based on the videos you view. In fact they usually get more from the YouTube Premium viewers than they do from people who opt to watch ads.

nick

Gary: that's a great idea to create Folders in the Favourites Bar. How do I create a folder so that it ends up in the Favourites Bar and not in the Bookmarks menu? thx

nick: Just select something in Favorites and the new folder will be there. You can also just easily move it later. You can also Control+click the Favorites bar to make a new folder. Lots of ways.

Erik M Gregorie

Gary, I noted your comment on add blockers and have used them but no longer. I have started using "Lockdown" after reading about the authors and seeing just how much is communicated without my knowledge. I have never considered having a Facebook account yet seeing what trackers are there sending data to them is worrisome. I haven't reviewed all your videos although I have been a fan for years, have you considered (or done) a series on maintaining privacy? Privacy nowadays seems little valued.

Erik: I've talked about the macOS privacy features as Apple has introduced them. I focus more on security, though.

Comments Closed.

Productivity Series: Web Browsers

Comments: 11 Responses to “Productivity Series: Web Browsers”

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