[from the ‘surf’ idiom for rapidly flipping TV channels] To traverse the Internet in search of interesting stuff, used esp. if one is doing so with a World Wide Web browser. It is also common to speak of surfing in to a particular resource.
Hackers adopted this term early, but many have stopped using it since
it went completely mainstream around 1995. The passive, couch-potato
connotations that go with TV channel surfing were never pleasant, and
hearing non-hackers wax enthusiastic about surfing the net
tends to make hackers feel a bit as though their home is being overrun by
ignorami.