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.
A couple more:
Ctrl-F4: Close tab
Ctrl-Shift-Tab: Previous tab
One that I use a lot:
/ brings up quick search
F3 for next item in the search
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
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
One or two there I had missed. Thanks! 🙂
Hitting Ctrl+K and then press Alt+Up/Down to view and choose from the whole list of your search engines.
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..
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.
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
alt + d: address bar too.
This one is very handy.
yes, very nice, but HOW DO YOU CHANGE THEM?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ctrl+Shift+click, drag and drop tab onto tab bar to duplicate tab, with full history. Used to be one of my favorite extensions.
There’s a nice cheatsheat of shortcuts here:
http://www.chrisdottodd.com/2006/10/firefox-keyboard-shortcuts.html
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
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 :)))
Here’s a shortcut tutorial:
Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts
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.
This is very helpful! Thanks a lot for the post.
Anyone know how/if you can have a hotkey for downloadthem all?
Thank you very much! I have just moved from Windows to Ubuntu, and the shortcuts in firefox are different.
this list is very helpful, as I use a screen reader. I would like to mention for that sake that hitting F11 makes the alt menu bar vanish. please be aware, as it can be annoying to fix because sometimes hitting f11 again doesn’t fix it and you have to have someone sighted use the mouse.
by the way these work awesome on windows even though this page says it’s for ubuntu.
ctrl+shift+t not working on my ubuntu 14.04
Thank you very much!!! This shortcuts are very helpfull for me… 🙂