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My Favorite Firefox Shortcut Keys
Ed Kohler
I'm a big fan of using the keyboard rather than a mouse whenever possible. It's so much faster to keep my hands hovering over the keys rather than bouncing over to a mouse or touchpad to do something I can do with a couple keys. FireFox has a ton of great keyboard shortcuts that will help you save milliseconds per action, which ads up to something like an extra week a year of time for surfing around on YouTube. Here are my favorites. The examples are from the Mac, but most can be converted to Windows by using Ctrl rather than Cmd.

  1. Cmd-T: Opens a new tab.
  2. Cmd-K: Moves cursor into the search box. I often use a Cmd-T followed by a Cmd-K to open and search in a new tab.
  3. Cmd-W: Close Tab. You have to close them eventually.
  4. Cmd-L: Moves cursor into the location bar.
  5. Cmd + Click: Opens a link in a new tab. A great way to open articles from news sites where they can load in a separate tab while you scan additional headlines.

And one more. Under Advanced Preferences, there is a check box for, "Search for text when I start typing." This really helps find things within a page. For example, after clicking through from a search result, you know the page you've landed on contains the terms you searched for. By simply tying the first few letters of one of the words, you'll immediately be taken to that part of the page. And it's smart enough to disable itself when you're filling out forms.

Firefox Advanced Find

What keyboard shortcuts do you rely on for efficient web surfing?



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Comments

1. Posted by: Ramesh on June 3, 2007 1:13 AM:

The most useful and less know shortcut key is ctrl+shift+t which opens the last closed tab. Many times we close a tab by mistake and in such a case we can use this shortcut key.




2. Posted by: Jerry on June 3, 2007 2:29 PM:

Cmd+K in Mac actually corresponds to Ctrl+F in Windows.




3. Posted by: npe on June 4, 2007 7:46 AM:

cmd+k corresponds to ctrl +k




4. Posted by: That guy on June 20, 2007 6:39 AM:

You can just get the "TabMixPlus" extension, and change a few settings. Then, you can open, close, undo closed tabs and everything you need by simply clicking either the left right or middle mouse button on different parts of the tab bar.

For example at the moment:
Double clicking on the tab bar opens a new tab.
Middle Clicking on the tab bar opens the last closed tab.
Middle clicking on a Tab closes the tab.

I don't know some people might find it easier using the keyboard shortcuts. But personally I find it too hard to remember all of them.

But some do come in handy like Cmd+K to go to the search bar. But then i just usually use Tab to get there.




5. Posted by: End User on July 19, 2007 11:35 PM:

for googling in new tab is even easier :-)

Ramesh: thank you very much! that is i wanted very much. i used "undoclosetab" that was supported very slowly by authors, but ith 2.0.0.5 it is AGAIN incompatible :-(




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