MacMost Now 79: Web Browsing Tips

Gary Rosenzweig takes a look at three simple techniques that make Web browsing easier: tabs, find-in-a-page, and the bookmarks bar.
You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).
Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with another man made episode of MacMost Now. You know, I use some fairly basic techniques when I surf the web, but I realized recently that not everybody knows about these techniques. So I picked my three favorites, let's go take a look at them. 
So technique number one is a simple use of tabs, not everybody knows about tabs, so let's take a look. To enable tabs you want to go to Safari preferences and bring up your preferences window, there you will see general appearance, bookmarks and tabs. In tabs you want to enable tabs and by simply clicking on some of these options here and you can see all the different ways that you can open tabs. You can take a look at that yourself, I'm just going to show you directly what happens. 
So here we are at the MacMost site, there is currently only one tab open so you don't see tabs at all. What I'm going to do is go down here and click on this link, I'm going to actually control click on it. And it will bring up a menu and the second item of the menu is open link in a new tab. When I do it I get some tabs at the top of the screen, this one's the page I want now and then here's a tab and I just click on it, I go to the other post that was there. I can open up as many tabs as I want. So I can go ahead here and control click on tutorials and open that in a new tab. Now I've got three tabs, and notice that this third tab loaded in the background while I was still viewing this second tab. You can also do lots of other tricks to open up a tab like control clicking will open up a tab like that. Now I have four tabs, so it's a quick and easy way to be multi-tasking as your surfing the web. 
Now the second technique I use all the time is the toolbar at the top and it usually comes by default with Apple, yahoo, etc. at the top there. What I do is I put the sites I go to all time in that tool bar as well, all you have to do is drag the icon for the website from the address bar into bookmarks bar and it will ask you to add the name, I always shorten the name to make it as short as possible, usually page titles are really long and that's what it tries to insert. Hit OK and now I have a link right there for MacMost. So I can go ahead and switch to Wikipedia here, I can go to MacMost. And you can add a whole bunch of different things in here. You can also go ahead and add entire lists of things, there's already a couple that are in there for you. You can find more control over the bookmarks bar by going to the bookmarks menu. Then selecting the bookmarks bar there and you can manage and edit everything in the bookmarks bar, to get rid of something you can actually drag it over to where you want it to go or you can control click on it and delete it or edit it. 
OK this next technique is the most basic technique to me but I know a lot of people don't know how to use this because of some of the emails I get. This is GameScene my main game site, and now if you go into the main games list you come up with this page that is a huge page listing all the games at the site, and its pretty massive, a lot of games there. What I get is an email from people saying they went to this page and they couldn't find the game they wanted to play. Say for instance, it was the game World Conquest. They couldn't find it. Well to me, it's the simplest thing in the world. When you come across a large page like this, you do a find on the page. Just simply do command F and it will bring up a little bar here at the top that allows you to find anything that you want in the page. So you just type conquest-- and there you go it finds that there is two games, Star Conquest and World Conquest and there is also World Conquest classic. So you quickly and easily find what's on a page. 
Now this comes in very handy when you come across a very large page of stuff. Say for instance you go to a news page like Yahoo news of Google news and you know there is going to be a story about the elections but you don't see it right away. I usually right away hit command F, type in elections and it highlights all of the times that the word elections appears on the page. It is very easy to use, but I am surprised how many surfers just don't use this on a day to day basis. 
Here's two other bonus techniques I use all the time, one is snap-back, you can find out more about that by going back to MacMost Now episode number 63 another one is using history, history is kind of like bookmarks, but its every page you went to. So if you visited something yesterday and you didn't think it was relevant and now suddenly it is, you can go and remember what that page is by just searching through your history. It's pretty easy to search through it or just to browse through it. So there are a couple little techniques that may help your web surfing. 
Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.
MacMost Now 79: Web Browsing Tips

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