May 15, 2003

surf

v.

[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.

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:27 AM

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