Henry Rose

I’ll never forget the first night I spent in the dorms at the University of Washington. I didn’t go to a crazy party. I didn’t even drink. I didn’t meet new people or see new sights. I got on the internet … fast.

This was September, 2001 and the broadband revolution was just getting started. I had a slick new Dell laptop that I’d bought for college and had used it for about a month at my parents house, on dial up internet. At the time I was a subscriber to a service called emusic, which provided legal downloads of a ton of music for a flat rate. I would download an album every once in a while, but had to expect that it would be an overnight affair.

That first night in the dorms I downloaded over 20 albums. Going from dialup internet to a 100mpbs connection to a core University network was quite a jump. I haven’t experience an increase in browsing speed like that in a long, long time.

I do have two tips that will help you browse faster today.

Fancy-Pants DNS

This first tip is something i moved over to some time ago. If you’re not familiar with DNS (Domain Name System), it’s basically the system that takes the human readable web addresses we’re familar with (google.com, henryrose.info, etc) and turns them in to IP addresses that our computers can understand. This service is generally handled by your ISP, but I recommend outsourcing the job to a pack of nerds.

The guys over at OpenDNS have worked hard to provide the fastest DNS lookups (along with a host of other features). You may think, how could translating the name of a website a little bit faster possibly make my browsing faster? Well it can, and the effect is amplified when you have content coming from multiple domains on a single page. For example if the site your looking at is on livejournal.com and contains images linked from flickr.com you’re already up to at least two DNS lookups. Complicated pages with lots of media resources can have many more.

Using OpenDNS couldn’t be easier, you’ll just need to change a few numbers in your network setup. The guys over there do a great job of explaining how to use it.

Safari

I hate to be a total fanboy, but Apple’s Safari 3 is a pretty sweet step forward in terms of page rendering speed. While I’m not sure I believe the numbers that Steve Jobs claims, i have noticed substantially faster load times, particularly for pages that use lots of javascript.

Pages such as GMail, Flickr and other so called Web 2.0 services use lots of javascript to make the page feel interactive, like a desktop application (think MS word). Safari seems to be the fastest at figuring out what all that javascript means, and making it work for you, the end user.

So there you have it, with these two tweaks to your browsing setup you should notice a substantial upturn in your speed. Enjoy!