This power surfing is of the kind your current browsers simply can’t provide. For instance, instead of opening a number of browser windows like you usually do - one for your email, another for sports, the weather, stock quotes or headlines, a meta browser actually lets you ‘pick and choose’ bits from these sites, to make one page that stacks your favourites one on top of the other. Needless to say, using these browsers to the best of their capabilities comes only with a bit of practice, though, once you spend a little time with them, you can conveniently forget all about the sluggish browser currently taking up your drive space.

Octopus (http://www.octopus.com/) is a good place to kick things off. Still in its experimental stage, the browser has already attracted a lot of attention. All you need to do is download a small Java applet. That done, you can personalise your browser to control pages you view, and save these customised views. While the content you can choose from is limited at present -- restricted to news, sports, and stocks - things should undoubtedly get better in future. Sadly, Octopus currently requires its users to have Internet Explorer 5 installed, which means that Netscape and Mac users may have to wait a while longer to use it.

Easy to use, easier to like, and the brainchild of a freelance journalist, Quickbrowse (http://www.quickbrowse.com/) is your next bet, as popular for its quick registration process as it is for its features. ‘Custom Masterpages’ are what it lets you create, which are continuous pages that put your favourite sites together. Take a bit of news from Rediff.com, add breaking business reports from the DowJones home page, put in some IT info from ZdNET, enter the URLs, and click Quickbrowse to find them all neatly stacked on top of each other. Best of all, users can actually have their Masterpages e-mailed to them daily, for fast access, or share their Quickbrowse bookmark with friends.

Similar, as far as the technology is concerned, is Call The Shots (http://www.calltheshots.com/), recently selected as one of Red Herring's Top 20 most promising technology companies. It lets you create ‘Combo’ pages comprising what it calls ‘blocks’ of a user’s favourite sites. Users can create various blocks of text or images and save them on one page, add blocks from other sites, and form a kind of jigsaw giving them exactly what they want from the Internet, and nothing more.

While it takes a while getting used to, this means that unwanted content like banner ads are thankfully left out in the cold. After building a ComboPage, users can also invite others to view it. An important issue raised here is: how does the browser avoid copyright violation? There’s a notice that warns against the ‘unauthorised copying or distribution of copyrighted works,’ but nothing specific has been laid out yet. Wait and watch, or take a peek while you’re at it.

Yodlee (http://www.yodlee.com/) is more for those tired of multiple online accounts. The browser simply centralises them, giving you a control panel to manage and access them all - whether email or shopping or auctions -- without making you sign in anywhere manually. It also tells you when you have new e-mail at a particular account, giving you the sender's name and subject line even without logging in! If that’s not enough, Yodlee also does what other metabrowsers do, viz. designate content channels you want at one location. It’s not terribly fast, currently, which is a downside; but a couple of improvements will have surfers across the planet lapping it up soon enough.

Taking up 2.4 MB, Katiesoft (http://www.katiesoft.com/) may find a few sceptics; but that should change the minute they take time out to actually launch the browser. Katiesoft lets users open up to four separate browser windows (called panes) that are navigable simultaneously. Sure, any metabrowser can do that, but can it also let you browse multiple panes, each with their own navigation? You can save ‘Snapshots’ of your custom panes, with not just the content but also pane size and position of the scrollbar! An auto refresh feature sets your panes to refresh the sites at a predetermined interval. You can also maximise or minimise a particular pane, returning to the multi-paned view whenever you feel like it. For those who have the money, paying $29.95 may be a good idea as it gets you an upgrade (the ‘App Capture’ online version is free) that integrates desktop applications too. This means you can check your mail and run another software programme like Microsoft Excel too, on the same page!

More options are readily available, like Clickmarks (http://www.clickmarks.com/), which helps users create customised, personal portals accessible on any device, wired or wireless. OnePage (http://www.onepage.com/) can identify particular content on a page and bring it back to a user’s personal page. Websplit ( http://www.websplit.com/) splits your browser in up to nine windows displaying thumbnail screenshots of selected sites. And Netcaptor (http://www.netcaptor.com/) opens up as many browser windows as you want, but charges you $19.95 for its effort.

After metabrowsers, the ‘anti-browser’ that claims to give you a ‘different Internet.’ Netomat (http://www.netomat.net/) retrieves information from the Web as soon as you pose a question using natural language. It scours cyberspace to throw up flowing text, images and audio on to your screen. Best of all, this data -- ranging from RealAudio and jpegs, to wav, gifs, html and plain text -- is not constrained by a web page or site, but is free floating and independent. Better still, it’s free.