As someone who does most of his work on the web, I’ve developed some habits to allow me to work quickly, without distraction, so that I can get my work done easily.

When I see others browse the web, it sometimes surprises me how far behind they are, and when others see me browse the web they’re surprised at how quick I am.

I’m not bragging — I know there are web monkeys faster than me. But I thought I’d share some of my tricks for the masses, in hopes that it’ll be of some use.

First, understand that everyone has their own personal style of browsing, and I don’t think you should adopt every tip below. This is what works for me. You probably won’t like it as much.

Second, understand that my philosophy is one of minimalism: I don’t like a lot of bells, whistles or distractions, and I like fast, lightweight programs that aren’t bloated or slow. I also like to work quickly, using the keyboard mostly, so that I can get my work done without friction.

So here are my tips — some of these will be old hat for web veterans, but they bear repeating.

Use a fast, minimal browser. First, if you’re using Internet Explorer and you don’t absolutely have to, please do yourself a favour and switch right now. It’s bloated and slow, insecure, and doesn’t render the web correctly. On the PC, there’s no contest — it’s Google Chrome, as it’s the fastest I’ve tried.

Use tabs, not windows. This should be obvious but many people still open a new window each time they’re going to a new site. Instead, configure your browser to open new tabs instead of windows. When you are reading a post, for example, and want to open a link in a new window, Command-click (on a Mac) or middle-click (on a PC) should open the link in a new tab. Now you can switch between tabs without needing to find where each window went.

Learn keyboard shortcuts. Again, this is obvious to most web monkeys, but it’s so much faster that you need to take the time to learn the shortcuts. Each browser and OS have different shortcuts, but you can easily learn them by looking at the shortcuts in the menus of the browser. It just takes a few minutes to learn them, and then you’re golden.

Block Flash. Adobe’s Flash format is everywhere on the web these days — popular sites like YouTube depend on it for video, and you’ll find it in ads everywhere, and some entire sites are built on Flash. It’s annoying, frankly. Flash is slow, and I prefer to turn it off by default … but have the option to turn it on if I want to watch a YouTube video or something. In other browsers, you might need a plugin or extension to turn off Flash but give yourself the ability to turn on Flash elements with a click.

Don’t have a million tabs open. This is a common web-surfing mode for a lot of people, but it slows down the browser. I tend to open lots of tabs at times, but when things get too cluttered I bookmark them for later reading (using Pinboard) and then close the tabs, so I have only two or three open at any time.

Clear most of your toolbars. I like minimal toolbars, so I turn most of them off on the browser and remove most buttons, so the content is all there is.

Use multiple browsers

There are so many types of browsers out there. They do not exist for no reason. Most of them will be different in terms of how it reads and interprets the scripts off HTML, some pages may contain badly written scripts with will slow down the loading of a particular page. Having browsers that can identify bad scripts will surf faster by omitting those scripts that simply waste your time. In the event one browser crashes or stops working, you can always fall back onto another browser and go from there.

Browsers these days even come in “portable apps”, which means you can install it into a thumb drive or any location in your computer. That way, it is so much easier to just thrash the whole corrupted browser program by deleting the whole folder and installing a fresh copy.