Surfing in the Fast Lane

Gregg Keizer

One thing most useful sites on the Web have in common is that their pages load quickly. In most cases, Yahoo's simple, low-bandwidth pages load faster than most others. But My Yahoo displays far more information on its main page than does the Yahoo home page, and with its heavy dependence on graphics and frames, it often lags behind the home page's zippy performance. Fortunately, you can speed up My Yahoo for slower connections if you follow our rules.

• Fit the page length to the size of your browser window. Open your browser and resize its window so it fills the entire vertical height of your monitor. Delete modules from the page (click on the Content button and deselect modules to do this) so you rid yourself of the need to scroll down. Build additional pages (click the Add Page link at the top of the screen to get started) if you want additional content.
• Include the Lead Photo module only if you have a fast connection.
• If you use the Stock Portfolio module, click the arrow at the upper left of that module to minimize the display so that individual quotes don't appear (and thus, aren't downloaded). The next time you reach My Yahoo, the portfolio will remain minimized. You can open the portfolio at your leisure by again clicking this arrow.
• Avoid selecting info-heavy modules, like the TV Listing, for your main page. Instead, put these on additional pages, where they'll be available only when you need them.
• Detach modules for faster refreshing. Some modules can be spawned into smaller, separate browser windows, so you don't have to reload the newest headlines when you just want your baseball box-scores. If you see the Respawn icon (it looks like two overlapped rectangles) in the module's title bar, just click the icon to respawn the window. The new window will just contain that module's information; click the Refresh link when you want to update it. Two common, detachable modules are the Front Page Headlines module and the Stock Portfolio module.