Quick tip: Mouseless browsing in Firefox

February 2 by | 6 comments | Productivity | Tags: , ,

In a follow up to his post yesterday about how to navigate Outlook without using the mouse, The Cranking Widgets Blog posted a list of useful keyboard shortcuts to browse the Web using Firefox without using the mouse. The following are the most useful and the most commonly used, in my opinion:

  • Put the Cursor in the Address Bar: Ctrl+L
  • Put the Cursor in the Search Box: Ctrl+K
  • Refresh the Current Page: Ctrl+R
  • Open a New Tab : Ctrl+T
  • Close the current Tab: Ctrl+W
  • Scroll Down one Page: Either hit Page Down or the Spacebar
  • Scroll Up one Page: Either hit Page Up or Shift+Spacebar
  • Hit Ctrl+Enter to open the Hyperlink in a new tab

You can visit The Cranking Widgets Blog for a more complete list. What would you add the list shown above?

Mouseless browsing in Firefox - [The Cranking Widgets Blog]

  • http://weblog.jcraveiro.com/ João Craveiro

    «Close the current Tab: Ctrl+W»
    Or Ctrl+F4 — and beware that these 2 shortcuts, at least in some versions of Firefox, aren’t interchangeable; they have strikingly different behaviours when you’re left with one tab to close.
    Specially for Windows user, this has the advantage of being consistent which most other application that have “subitems” (tabs, documents, …) to close; this shortcut is around since Windows 3.1 ;)

    «Refresh the Current Page: Ctrl+R»
    Or (Ctrl+)F5

    «Put the Cursor in the Address Bar: Ctrl+L»
    Or Alt+D, or F6

    Plus:
    – On Firefox 2 (at least) F7 turns “Caret Browsing” which allows selection of text with the keyboard
    – Finding text on a page: Ctrl+F or F3

    Of course there are more shortcuts, but these are those I think are the most useful for a simple browsing experience with a keyboard.

  • http://www.bardland.org/blog/ bardo

    Caret browsing is available in Firefox 1.5, too. Its main feature, I think, is not selecting text, but allowing movement through the page without being limited to jumps from one link to the next as with Tab. Smooth scrolling allows not to lose focus on what one is reading.

  • Jacob

    Reopen the last closed tab: Ctrl+Shift+T

  • Cory

    For incremental search in the web page:

    “/” — searches entire page
    “‘” — searches only links

    Once text has been found it is highlighted and you can move to the next search hit using F3. Very useful for searching link text because once it’s highlighted you can Ctrl+Enter to open the link in a new tab.

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  • http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/ Matthew Cornell

    o Shift+Spacebar: Nice! Didn’t know that one

    o Also, I’m with Jacob: Ctrl+Shift+T is a frickin’ godsend

    o I use the up and down arrows to scroll in smaller increments

    One thing not mentioned is Firefox’s focus problems – sometimes you have to click somewhere in the window (but not on a link/button/etc.) in order for the window to “see” keystrokes. I’m OK with it but I’m a geek – I bet it drives our moms nuts…