Last year, I switched from having dead-tree subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times to online subscriptions (although I still get the weekend Times so I can read the magazine section and book review and Arts & Leisure in bed). By and large, this has worked brilliantly--it's much cheaper, and reduces my paper recycling vastly.
Yesterday, annoyed when NYTimes.com crashed TWICE in the same session, I decided to try reading the papers with Firefox instead of IE (which truly puts the bowser in browser). I've just done it twice, but Firefox seems to be much better for newspaper reading. Ironically, I don't have the latest plug-ins installed in Firefox, which speeds things up a lot because I can't play the videos and don't WANT to play the videos. I'm a very visual processer of information, and I can skim information in print a lot faster than I can watch a video, and if I want to keep something, it takes up a lot less space as a .txt than as a video.
Sometimes I have to link to newspaper articles from the Administration on Aging listserv. Those sites are almost impossible to use--they're so full of beeping and flashing garbage that the actual news article takes up about a fifth of the screen, so if it's an article of any size you have to click to three or four more screens with additional beeping and flashing garbage.
The NYTimes reported on a program called Readability, which allows you to get ONLY the text on a page, in several formats that make it look like a book or a newsletter. I haven't installed it yet--I tend to associate "install new software" with "computer gets completely stuffed"--but it sounds intriguing.
