SURFING
Surfing, as it is commonly known, is actually moving from Web page to Web page or web site to web site, or navigating around the Web. To do this you use special software called a browser. Some of the most often used browsers are Internet Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera, Netscape. The word surfing, however, gives the impression of speed, which is often unjustified. If your Internet connection is slow and Web pages take long to display/download, there are two simple, but most useful, things you can do to speed the process up (a bit).

- Do things in parallel: two windows are better than one.
Just open two or more browser windows to view pages from different web sites on each of them.
- Save things and work off-line.

If you're already familiar with working with many windows open at the same time, you'll need no further explanation for the first technique. With the second, however, I will now give you some guidance.

WORKING OFF-LINE
If you regularly use pages that don't change very often, it can be worth saving them on your hard disk. Later, when not connected to the Internet, you can open the same saved pages and read them. This is called "offline reading" and in general it is what it means - working offline.

To save a web page to your computer, you'll make exactly the same steps as you would with any other document. Just go to File->Save As and from the dialogue box select the folder you want it to be; hit "Save", and proceed with the next page. There's also another way of storing pages for offline reading, which is even more useful since you'll also have the URL stored. What I'm talking about is Bookmarks (in Netscape - NS) and Favorites (in Internet Explorer - IE). When you visit a page that you think you'll want to visit again, you can save a copy of the address (the URL) as a bookmark. To do this (with IE) go to Favorites->Add to Favorites. This action, however, stores only the URL. If you want to store the page content you'll have to tick in the dialogue box where it says "Make available offline". When offline, you can open it from this same Favorites menu and view it in its full beauty. There's another useful feature that IE has. The browser offers you how deep into the site to go. Try it some time. This is all very well, but mind that it is also very easy to fill up your hard disk. That's why you have to review your offline content (the stored pages) and either copy pages to floppies or delete those you don't need so that you free some space on your hard disk.

Here's, of course, a task for you to do online and reflect on what you do.