[MW Forums]

Web browsing these days is more than just point-and-click. Tabs, shortcuts, passwords, PDFs and other productivity tools can help you find what you’re looking for. But getting a grip on it all can be a daunting task. Our team of experts offer these 15 ways to quickly find what you want online. more

[Kees]

one of the biggest time savers for me is command-clicking to open a link in a new tab. (or middle button of your mouse) In combination with the 'load new tabs in background' option, this lets you very quickly open various google results, for example.
And to save more time, especially if you don't need/use a ton of extensions, personally, I find Camino to be much faster than FireFox (or Safari for that matter)

[Roustem]

Safari and Firefox can help you to surf faster by saving your online login information.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to share stored passwords between these two browsers and that is one of the reasons I wrote a unique password manager for mac. It has extensions for Safari, Camino, Firefox, and Flock and can generate secure passwords and store them in a separate keychain -- you can easily switch between the browsers.

[spimster]

I don't know exactly where the breakdown occurs, but i don't think that the browser itself puts in the "www" & "com" after you enter simply "nike" or "apple".
This fails at my work because of our corporate firewall. (I get a "Host not found" error from our DNS server). So, I assume (guessing as a fairly NON-technical person) that it is fetching the probable address from an internet server somewhere.
This tip does work as you mention at home, of course, and is indeed a good time-saver.

[bastion]

I don't know exactly where the breakdown occurs, but i don't think that the browser itself puts in the "www" & "com" after you enter simply "nike" or "apple". ... So, I assume (guessing as a fairly NON-technical person) that it is fetching the probable address from an internet server somewhere.
Nope. It's the browser. What typically happens behind the scenes is that the browser will try a name lookup on the literal text you entered and if that fails will try several "obvious" guesses based on the structure of what was typed. If, for you, "nike" doesn't work by "www.nike.com" does, it suggests that the firewall your company is running is somehow manipulating the lookup response such that the browser doesn't think subsequent guesses are going to be any more successful.