by Kenneth Lawson

Created on: April 04, 2009

Today browsing the Internet is a daily part of living, and in many cases doing your job, both for work and pleasure,. Many years ago he choices for a web bowser were very limited. Of course we're going back to Windows 95 and 98 and most users were getting used to the concept of the web in general, importantly 99% of consumer and many business connection were dial-up. Which is very slow and then many times didn't even come up to the advertised speed. Needless to say browsing the net was not the best experience in many ways.

Thankfully in many areas, the age of the dial-up is pretty much gone. However, it should be noted that they are still pockets of rural areas that still don't have access to a faster connection are are unlikely to for quite some time. Enough with history.

The average computer user today has a wide variety of choices of web browsers to use. Unfortunately, many folks still use the default browser that comes on any windows machine. Internet Explorer. While IE works and is functional it is notoriously full of security holes. In many ways behind the curve as far as innovation.

The main competitor to IE is Firefox, a open source browser that is gaining popularly all over the world. Firefox has many things going for it. Mostly its NOT Microsoft. It is highly customizable its list of plug-ins and ad on the can extent its capabilities is almost endless. There are many other choices today, Opera, which has been around for a long time, is also very customizable , and has many handy features built in. One of the main selling point for these browsers is the built in pop-up blocker. when turned on, it will automatically block unrequested pop ups. Using one of theses browser, or even the newest kid on the block, Google's Chrome,will greatly enhance your web experience.

However, there are a few other things to do that in the long run, will help your and your computer live happily together.

The first thing you must do is have a anti-virus program running the background. AVG is a good choice, it can be set up to automatically update itself and run every night by itself, thus not waiting for you to remember to run it every week or so.( And you know You'll forget) o this solves that problem. This will help keep your whole system clean. While there are things that may get through it should keep most of the baddies out. Using a second program to go back and scan periodicy to hopefully catch anything AVG misses is not bad idea. The other program that one should have available is a program specify for scanning your web browsers and catching evil programs and tracking cookies that may get set on your machine is Ad-aware. Running this will catch stuff not always found by by a regular anti-virus program.

Things you can do within the browser is setting the cache as low as possible, so it only cache a small number of pages and then starts overwriting itself, sooner. The other import thing is is to set the cookies to accept for original site only. this will prevent a lot of third party and tracking cookies from getting set. Everything that I have mention here is stuff I do do on all of my machines.

Using a current web browser and keeping your machine running a good anti-virus and anti spy ware programs like those I mentioned will go a long way towards improving your Internet browsing experience .

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