Internet Is Fun 
The browser is the most-used piece of software on most computers and the least-explored. Nearly everyone uses about five of its features and ignores the rest, which is a shame, because several of the ignored ones are genuinely good.
Shortcuts below use Ctrl for Windows and Linux; on a Mac, substitute Cmd. Availability varies a little by browser, so treat this as a list to try rather than a specification.
Reader mode
Firefox, Safari and Edge all have a built-in reading view that strips a page down to its text. It removes the sidebars, the newsletter box, the sticky header and the cookie banner remnants in one keystroke โ Ctrl+Alt+R in Firefox, or the small icon in the address bar.
It is the single highest-value feature most people never touch, and it works on exactly the sites that most need it.
Tab search
If you routinely have more tabs than fit, Ctrl+Shift+A in Chrome and Edge opens a searchable list of every open tab, including recently closed ones. Type three letters, press Enter, done.
This solves the actual problem with having ninety tabs, which is not memory usage but that you cannot find the one you want. The deeper version of that problem is in why you have 100 browser tabs open.
Reopen what you just closed
Ctrl+Shift+T reopens the last closed tab, and keeps going back through the ones before it if you press it again. It works after an accidental window close too.
Per-site settings
Click the icon to the left of the address bar and you get controls for that site alone: block its notifications, deny its camera and location, stop it autoplaying sound, set a permanent zoom level. Per-site zoom in particular is underrated โ the one site whose text is too small can simply be fixed forever.
Blocking notification prompts globally is also worth finding in settings. It removes an entire category of interruption permanently.
Custom address-bar searches
Chrome and Firefox both let you assign a keyword to a search. Set w for Wikipedia and typing w then space then your term goes straight there, skipping the search engine entirely. Set up four or five of these for the sites you search most and the address bar becomes considerably more useful.
Picture-in-picture
Right-click a video twice in Chrome, or use the control that appears in Firefox, and it pops out into a small floating window that stays on top while you do something else. Built in, no extension required.
Profiles
Separate profiles keep separate cookies, history, bookmarks and logins. The obvious use is work and personal, but it is also the cleanest way to stay signed into two accounts on the same service, and to keep a browsing context that is not contaminated by everything else you do.
A few worth knowing without explanation
- Ctrl+L โ jump to the address bar without the mouse.
- Ctrl+P then “Save as PDF” โ the universal way to keep a copy of a page.
- Ctrl+F then Enter repeatedly โ cycle matches; most browsers also mark them on the scrollbar.
- Pinned tabs โ right-click a tab, pin it, and it shrinks to an icon and stops being closeable by accident.
- Ctrl+H โ history, which is more searchable than people expect. See how to find a website you’ve forgotten.
The general point
None of this is hidden in any real sense โ it is all in menus you have opened. It is unused because nobody ever has a reason to read a menu. Ten minutes spent going through yours deliberately is probably the best return available on ten minutes of computer admin.
For the related job of making the browser stop actively annoying you, see how to make your browser less annoying.
