Synthetic Monitoring
Thanksgiving is a time for all of us to de-stress, unwind, eat turkey, and be thankful we have the ability to surf the Internet in the first place. Slower-than-desirable website loading times are annoying, but today, let’s try our best to sit back and look inwards. Besides, it’s the holidays, and no one’s going to be hard at work trying to optimize their app’s site speed on your phone. Instead, let’s go over some ways you can improve your browsing experience by improving your browser speed.
1. Delete Your History
While little bits of data that keep track of where you’ve been and when don’t seem like much, try multiplying that by several thousand. Your browser history can be quite a pickle if it hasn’t been cleared recently…like sometime in the past several years. If you really want to keep a record of your internet history, you can just export it or save it in a Google document
2. Ditch Your Toolbar
How often do you use your toolbar? If you’re anything like the vast majority of Internet users, the answer is probably somewhere between “never” and “What’s a toolbar?” Yet toolbars come by default with new browser installations, and they take up quite a bit of memory to stay up there on the browser dock. Disable your toolbar – you can always enable it again when you really need it.
3. Turn Off Unused Extensions
The most common bog-down for browser speed comes in the form of helpful extensions and add-ons that services are constantly asking you to consider. Unlike histories, cookie lists, and bookmarks, add ons are basically mini-apps that chug away in the background and eat up memory. While many add-ons are certainly indispensable (like AdBlock), others aren’t as crucial. Pick and choose the ones you need and uninstall the rest.
4. Export Your Bookmarks
Bookmarks are invaluable if you’re a regular browser (or a slow typer), but once again, they don’t have to be saved on your browser. Speed things up by exporting your bookmarks in a save file or by copy-pasting the actual URLs into a Google document. Then, all you need is one bookmark for that document, and you can access all your other links from there. Simple, right?
5. Change Browsers
Back in 2012 Internet Explorer tried to get young blood by launching a campaign called “The Browser You Love(d) to Hate.” Seriously, it was so infamously slow that even Microsoft started making fun of it. Another running joke posits that “Internet Explorer is the 4th best browser in the US.” Right behind Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, of course.
In other words, if you’re still using Internet Explorer, you should really think about changing to another browser. Some will swear by Google Chrome, Apple users will stay loyal to Safari, and Mozilla still wins the Hipster Choice Awards, but using Internet Explorer is like asking for slow browsing speed. Please make the commitment to change to another browser soon.
While individually these changes may not noticeably increase your browser speed, cumulatively they can make a big difference. So, while you’re recovering from your turkey overdose this evening, take some time to hit up these suggestions for a faster browsing experience in 2014.
Happy Thanksgiving!