By default your browser history is kept for way too long, which takes up system resources and slows down the browser.  Limiting history size is an excellent way to quickly speed up your browser.

Firefox users:

1. Go to Tools - Options
2. Click on Privacy
3. Then select any number under Keep my history for at least … days. I have it on 7.
4. 
5. Click OK

By the way, if you don’t want to keep any private data at all, simply check Always clear my private data when I close Firefox. To specify what you want cleared, click on the Settings button and check relevant checkboxes.

Internet Explorer 8 users:

1. Go to Tools - Internet Options
2. Under Browsing History click on the Settings button
3. Select a number to keep you browsing history
4. 
5. Before you click OK I would recommend forbidding the browser to check for newer version of stored pages (select Never) and allowing 50MB of disk space to store Temporary Internet Files (the default number is ridiculous).

Enjoy a faster browser!

Fast Internet browsing is not all about your connection speed. One of the key factors is how familiar you are with your browser and what you can do to make it even more comfortable to use. In this article I’m going to show you how to customize Internet Explorer 8.

First of all you’ll need to unlock the toolbar. Just right-click on it and uncheck Lock the Toolbar. Now you can move the Favorites Bar and the Command Bar anywhere you like and customize how much space each bar uses. You can also hide the Favorites Bar to make IE8 look like IE7, or hide the Command Bar, if you don’t need it (or both for that matter). If you like having the Menu Bar at hand, right-click on the toolbar and select Menu Bar. It will appear.

There is a thing I really like about Internet Explorer 8 – you can choose where to have the Refresh and Stop buttons – to the left of the address bar, or to the right of it.

If you have any third-party toolbars installed, sometimes you might want to close them quickly. That’s really easy with IE8, because each toolbar will have a close button  from now on. To activate your installed toolbars right-click on the toolbar area and choose the third-party toolbar you want to appear.

And last, but not least – use Internet Explorer add-ons, such as search tools, accelerators, and web slices. They can be really handy and can make web browsing a lot more enjoyable. You can get various IE extensions here.

As a side note – if you want to have a really customizable browser, switch to Firefox.