FireFox is full of keyboard shortcuts that can dramatically increase your web browsing productivity if you spend a little bit of time learning them.
As an example to whet your appetite, consider the following workflow:
- You need to execute a web search and place the results in a new tab
- What you're looking for is the first result in the list
- You click the link
How do you do this? If your answer is "I would move my hand off of the keyboard, grab my mouse, click the search bar at the top of the browser, move my hand back to the keyboard, type my search, press enter, realize I need to click the first item in the list, move my hand back to the mouse, and finally click the first result in the list," then you're browsing the way I did for so long: slow.
Here's how you would do this in FireFox using the keyboard:
- Ctrl + K - This moves you to the search box (you can also use Ctrl + E, but I use the pneumonic looK to remember Ctrl + K as being associated with search).
- Type your search and press enter.
- Press the ' key - This opens a find tool that only searches for link text, really handy when you want to move the focus to a link without grabbing the mouse.
- Type in a few identifying characters of the link you want to "click." For example, if the result in the list you need to click says "How to browse faster," you might type "browse fas." If you don't "hit" the link you're trying to click the first time, press F3 to go forward to the next link-search result or Shift + F3 to go backward until the link you're after is highlighted.
- Press enter.
Try it for yourself. You can get around the web very quickly this way.
Beginner's Guide to Keyboard Browsing
Here are some of FireFox's keyboard shortcuts. I've tried to categorize the keyboard shortcuts by practical use. You should be able to read this list from top to bottom and "discover" how to drive FireFox with the keyboard. In fact, I would encourage you to open a browser and work your way through this list to see just how easy it is to command from the keyboard.
The Fundamentals
| Select the location (address) bar |
Ctrl + L (for Location)
or
Alt + D |
| Open location |
Enter while in the location bar |
| Open location(or search result) in a new tab |
Alt + Enter while in the location bar (or web search box) |
| Auto-add "www." and ".com" to what you've typed in the location bar (i.e. type "amazon" and have FireFox automatically convert it to "www.amazon.com") |
Ctrl + Enter after typing in the location bar |
| Auto-add "www." and ".net" to what you've typed in the location bar (i.e. type "silverlight" and have FireFox automatically convert it to "www.silverlight.net") |
Shift + Enter after typing in the location bar |
| Auto-add "www." and ".org" to what you've typed in the location bar (i.e. type "blender" and have FireFox automatically convert it to "www.blender.org") |
Ctrl + Shift + Enter after typing in the location bar |
| Scroll within the page |
Up and down arrows for single line, page up and page down for page |
| Click a link |
Press the ' key to "search" the page for links. Type in part of the link text, ideally a part that is unique on the page. If necessery, use F3 and Shift + F3 to cycle forward/backward through the links on the page which match your search. Once the link is highlighted, press enter. |
| Back |
Ctrl + Left Arrow |
| Forward |
Ctrl + Right Arrow |
| Open a selected link in a new tab |
Ctrl + Enter |
| Open a selected link in a new window |
Shift + Enter |
| Switch tabs |
Ctrl + [0-9] - You can immediately switch to any of the first 9 tabs you might have open by pressing Ctrl plus a number key (i.e. Ctrl + 3 switches to the third tab from the left). |
| Close the current tab |
Ctrl + W
or
Ctrl + F4, much like Alt + F4 closes an entire window. |
| Open a new tab |
Ctrl + T |
| Open a new window |
Ctrl + N |
| Move to the browser's web search box |
Ctrl + K (as in looK)
or
Ctrl + E (as in googlE or livE) |
| Switch the current search engine in the search box |
While in the search box (Ctrl + K), press Ctrl + Down Arrow or Ctrl + Up Arrow to move through the search engine options. |
| Bookmark current page |
Ctrl + D |
| Selecting text |
Press F7 to start "Caret Browsing" mode. Basically FireFox puts a caret in the middle of the page much like you would see in a word processor. You can't change the text, but you can move the caret with the keyboard to navigate the document and highlight text. |
Shortcuts Developers Should Know
| View the HTML source of the current page |
Ctrl + U |
| Reload the page |
F5 |
| Reload the page and force the browser's cache to be ignored |
Ctrl + F5 |
| Display the error console |
Ctrl + Shift + J |
The Complete List
You can find the complete list of keyboard shortcuts at Mozilla's FireFox website: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Keyboard+shortcuts
If you learn the FireFox keyboard shortcuts, and learn them well, you'll find your browser experience involves a lot less friction. Don't be surprised if you still reach for the mouse at first out of habit, but once you learn how to use the keyboard there's no going back.