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.