I was at my friend Olivier’s place and he was showing me his searches on eBay. It’s a good thing he was using Firefox as he benefits from more stability, security and the support of open standards this way.
However, I noticed he was opening new windows for his searches (trackpad right-click and Open in New Window) instead of using Firefox’s tabbed browsing and switching through them using Alt-Tab on his Windows laptop.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked.
“Because it’s faster to use the keyboard to switch between windows.” he replied.
Essentially, Olivier was using the right tool but not using its particular strengths and had a poor excuse for not knowing how to use Firefox properly. Some of the Firefox features would be slightly wasted if he was stuck in a Windows-switching habit. I usually combine the trackpad with the keyboard for navigating in Firefox.
Here are some keyboard shortcuts and other tips to boost your productivity when browsing with Firefox.
1. CTRL-K to go straight to the search bar and enter your search term
2. On the results page, maintain CTRL and navigate to the links of interest using the trackpad and Left-Click on the trackpad button. This will open all the links in different tabs in a single Firefox Window in the background, while you’re hunting for other relevant search results. If you use a wheel-mouse, most probably a wheel-click is already set to do just that. This method is great for Digg also or any other site with a lot of links that you want to browse to.
3. CTRL-TAB to navigate the tabs forwards or CTRL-SHIFT-TAB to navigate backwards.
I know the Mozilla keyboard shortcuts page says you can also use CTRL-Page Up and CTRL-Page Down, but if one of your tab contains a page with a entry box in focus, then you’ll be stuck on that tab when you get to it.
4. CTRL-W to close a tab
5. CTRL-T to open a new tab
6. CTRL-D to add to your Bookmarks
7. CTRL-B to open your Bookmarks sidebar
8. Backspace to navigate back
9. CTRL-Trackpad slide down to increase font size and CTRL-Trackpad slide up to decrease it. This works if you can already use your trackpad’s rightmost y-column to smooth scroll a page up or down like I do.
Last but not least, a really great time-saver:
10. CTRL-SHIFT-T to re-open a tab you just closed by mistake.
Mozilla has a page for Firefox keyboard shortcuts.
