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Use add-ons for easier searching Generally, the more add-ons you have, the slower your browser will be. But that doesn’t necessarily mean your actual browsing will be slower, because many add-ons actually make it easier to explore the web. For example, Internet Explorer’s accelerator add-ons make it easier to search online. Go to www.iegallery.com/addons and type accelerator into the search box, then click ‘add-ons’. You should see the Wikipedia accelerator at the top of the results list - if not, you may be in the ‘United states (English)’ version. Switch this at the top of the page to ‘Uk & Ireland (English)’

Whether an accelerator is worth installing really depends on your browsing habits and how often you visit a particular website. The most useful accelerator is probably the one for Google because it effectively provides a search shortcut when you’re browsing the web. Once you add it to Internet Explorer, simply highlight a section of text on any webpage, right-click it, move your cursor over All Accelerators in the dropdown menu, and click ‘Search with Google United Kingdom’. For example,

in our screenshot above we’ve highlighted ‘Windows XP’ on Wikipedia, which leads to the Google accelerator shortcut.

Other accelerators work in the same way, including one for Wikipedia itself, and another for eBay, which lets you quickly search for products being sold. The best Firefox add-on to perform this trick is InstaClick (https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/), which lets you open a link in a new tab by right-clicking it. Install the add-on by clicking the green ‘Add to Firefox’ button. Clicking the blue Contribute button which asks you to make a small donation to the add-on’s developer-is optional. You should also try FastestFox (https://addons.mozilla.org/Fastestfox), which offers word definitions along with search options whenever you highlight a word. And if you use a lot of tabs when using Firefox, try Multiple Tab Handler (https://addons.mozilla.org/Tab-handler/), which adds loads of brilliant options to control your tabs. You have to restart Firefox after installing each add-on. Browsing in Chrome is already so fast and easy you may think you don’t need any add-ons, but it’s worth trying a few out anyway. Have a look through the Search & Browsing Tools section on the Chrome Web Store

(https://chrome.google.com/webstore/). You should definitely add Google’s official Search extension

(https://chrome.google.com/google-search/), as well as the Personal Blocklist

(https://chrome.google.com/personal-blocklist) which lets you remove certain websites from appearing in your search results.