ACCORDING to MSN, Microsoft's internet portal, the UK internet population is growing in the same sort of way that rabbits reproduce - in other words, very fast.

In fact, MSN (www.msn.co.uk) has proudly put together a bunch of figures saying that its users have actually out-done the rabbits and grown in number faster than your typical warren would have done.

Two rabbits put in a cage together in 1998 would have produced the somewhat startling total of over 82,000 descendants by 2000, said MSN and a rabbit expert - Roger Trout of the Rabbit Wise consultancy (www.rabbitwise.com).

Back in December 1998, MSN was attracting about one million unique users per month. Now, it says, it gets that number in a day.

This is clear evidence that the number of people online in the UK is growing, and growing very fast. Thanks to MSN's deal with the likes of WH Smith in every high street in the land, a lot of people are signing up for their first internet account with MSN, simply by popping a CD-Rom in their brand new home computer.

Surfing's usually great fun, but too many people are still having to keep an eye on the clock while they do it, to prevent nasty surprises with next month's phone bill.

Thankfully most modern browsers have evolved added functions that allow you to perform all sorts of tasks that little bit quicker, and so save you some time and money in the process.

ONE of the best ways of keeping your surfing time down is to "surf" offline - keep a stock of web pages on your hard disk which you can read at any time, without having to connect to the net.

Most browsers now allow you to set up offline browsing preferences like this, which will update the stored pages automatically every time you do go online.

Another good tip is to save individual pages you come across on the net to your hard disk, and come back to them later on. By far the best way of doing this is by saving them as a "web archive".

In the old days, saving a web page meant that the page's HTML would be saved - so when you opened it, you either got a page full of HTML code or a structured web page without the graphics.

A web archive means you can store both the page HTML and the graphics, all in a neat structure of their own, anywhere on your own computer. When you open the page in your browser while offline, it will look just like it did when you were connected.

Saving pages as web archives is a bit slower than other means of saving things from the web, but if you want to have a leisurely read of something and to appreciate the graphic design that went into making it, it's probably the best way.