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Firefox Shortcut Keys

Not long ago the USB mouse that I’ve been using with my laptop finally died. Granted it may have been due to me stubbing my toe on my backpack and crushing it during the middle of the night. In any event, I’ve become pretty proficient in the use of keyboard shortcuts in Firefox at this point. I thought I would share a few with you.

Navigation Shortcuts

Forward, backward, home, address bar and search bar can be done via keyboard shortcuts:

alt+Left Arrow : back

alt+Right Arrow : forward

alt+Home : Home

ctrl+L : address bar

F6 : address bar

ctrl+K : search bar

ctrl+K+Down Arrow : toggle search engine down

ctrl+K+Up Arrow : toggle search engine up

Tab Shortcuts

Opening, closing and navigating your tabs can be done via these shortcuts:

ctrl+t : new tab

ctrl+w : close tab

ctrl+Page Up : previous tab

ctrl+Page Down : next tab

ctrl+tab : next tab

alt+num (1, 2, 3, etc) : tab number

ctrl+shift+T : open recently closed tabs

ctrl+r : refresh tab content

ctrl+shift+r : force-refresh tab content

ctrl+u : view tab source

Are there any shortcuts that I’ve missed? If you’ve got anything to share, comment.

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Other Points of Interest

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July 8, 2008 -- Improve Application Startup Times With Preload (5)
June 25, 2008 -- Install Adobe Acrobat Plugins For Firefox (5)
June 18, 2008 -- Tunnel Web and DNS Traffic Over SSH (5)
June 13, 2008 -- Mozilla Firefox Easter Eggs (8)

Post a comment — Trackbacks closed RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Sunday, June 22, 2008, at 6:24 am by Christer Edwards. Filed in Internet and tagged firefox, keyboard shortcuts.

21 Comments

Trevor Creech

A couple more:
Ctrl-F4: Close tab
Ctrl-Shift-Tab: Previous tab

Posted on 22-Jun-08 at 7:24 am | Permalink
Andreas Wenning

One that I use a lot:
/ brings up quick search
F3 for next item in the search

Posted on 22-Jun-08 at 8:58 am | Permalink
Derek Buranen

to change search engines.

ctrl+k to focus search engine box,

then ctrl+up or ctrl+down to change search engines.

holding ctrl+k and hitting up or down is awkward

Posted on 22-Jun-08 at 9:05 am | Permalink
Robin

Do you know smart keywords? I very much prefer them over the search engines box, they’re faster and easier to use. You should give them a try:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/smart-keywords.html

Posted on 22-Jun-08 at 9:12 am | Permalink
Stoffe

One or two there I had missed. Thanks!

Posted on 22-Jun-08 at 9:54 am | Permalink
Martin

Hitting Ctrl+K and then press Alt+Up/Down to view and choose from the whole list of your search engines.

Posted on 22-Jun-08 at 12:28 pm | Permalink
stefan

Thnx for the ctrl + tab!
didn’t know that.

And a little addition:
I also use / for search a lot, but instead of F3 i use ctrl + G to go to next search item..

Posted on 22-Jun-08 at 4:50 pm | Permalink
sbeattie

Alt+[1-8] work numerically as you expect, selecting the first through eighth tab respectively, but alt-9 takes you to the last (rightmost) tab, not the ninth one (unless you only have 9 tabs open). Useful for jumping to that tab you just opened up in the background.

Posted on 23-Jun-08 at 2:12 am | Permalink
Mats Halldin

Also,
Ctrl+I opens “page Information. Can be useful, for example, when you want to download a background image or hidden image from a page.

Thanks for the search engine shortcuts, I’ve been wondering.
/ Mats

Posted on 23-Jun-08 at 4:55 am | Permalink
Klaus Paiva

alt + d: address bar too.

This one is very handy.

Posted on 23-Jun-08 at 6:47 am | Permalink
tim

yes, very nice, but HOW DO YOU CHANGE THEM?

Posted on 23-Jun-08 at 9:30 am | Permalink
Mårten

After opening the menu of search engines (Ctrl+K Alt+Down) you can choose search engine by typing the first letter in it’s name. If several search engines share their first letter you cycle through them by repeating the letter and choose one by hitting return.

So “Ctrl+K Alt+Down I” selects IMDb for me.

Posted on 23-Jun-08 at 12:11 pm | Permalink
Andrew Conkling

My favorite tab-related shortcut is actually something an extension provides. LastTab gives you an Alt+Tab-like navigation of tabs in recently used order.

Also, F6 works to highlight the address bar, but is there a shortcut to highlight the browser window itself? A lot of the shortcuts don’t work when you’re in the Search box/Location bar, but there doesn’t seem to be a reliable way to get out of there.

Posted on 23-Jun-08 at 2:43 pm | Permalink
mlissner

backspace will take you back to the previous page, if you set browser.backspace_action variable in about:config.

Space will scroll down. Some oldies but goodies. Also, turning on “Find as you type” makes life oh so much easier.

Also, if you press apostrophe before doing a search, it will only search links, I believe.

Posted on 23-Jun-08 at 8:16 pm | Permalink
Mike Burton

When I run Firefox on my EEE PC, the first thing I do is hit the F11 key. That ensures that Firefox uses every bit of screen real estate. Makes the browsing experience on that 7″ screen much more pleasant.

Posted on 25-Jun-08 at 11:51 am | Permalink
omegamormegil

Ctrl+Shift+click, drag and drop tab onto tab bar to duplicate tab, with full history. Used to be one of my favorite extensions.

Posted on 30-Jun-08 at 4:43 pm | Permalink
http://www.technorati.com/people/technorati/AHinMaine

There’s a nice cheatsheat of shortcuts here:
http://www.chrisdottodd.com/2006/10/firefox-keyboard-shortcuts.html

Posted on 08-Jul-08 at 1:20 pm | Permalink
1soup

if you click a hot link, one that has been coded with “www.example.com”
with your mouse wheel, it will open in a new tab

Posted on 21-Jul-08 at 5:08 am | Permalink
Fred W

There’s a nice cheatsheat of shortcuts here:
http://www.chrisdottodd.com/2006/10/firefox-keyboard-shortcuts.html

http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2008/06/22/firefox-shortcut-keys/

http://snipurl.com/3c5qc

Thank you very much for this. This is my second go-around with Firefox and am just getting started again and this is a good sheet to have. Thanks. Fred ))

Posted on 07-Aug-08 at 12:15 am | Permalink
Jian

Here’s a shortcut tutorial:

Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts

Posted on 07-Aug-08 at 3:06 pm | Permalink
hardly

There are a few things that I have noticed that are pretty helpful.
Lets say that you want to go to http://www.example.com, you type "example" and then press CTRL+ENTER to wrap the http:// and the .com around it.
SHIFT+ENTER wraps with .net
CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER wraps with .org.

Posted on 27-Apr-09 at 1:51 am | Permalink

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