Firefox Shortcut Keys

By | 2008/06/22

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.

28 thoughts on “Firefox Shortcut Keys

  1. Andreas Wenning

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

  2. 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

  3. Stoffe

    One or two there I had missed. Thanks! 🙂

  4. Martin

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

  5. 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..

  6. 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.

  7. 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

  8. tim

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

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

  15. shyam

    This is very helpful! Thanks a lot for the post.

  16. Simon Dedman

    Anyone know how/if you can have a hotkey for downloadthem all?

  17. Minas

    Thank you very much! I have just moved from Windows to Ubuntu, and the shortcuts in firefox are different.

  18. C

    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.

  19. C

    by the way these work awesome on windows even though this page says it’s for ubuntu.

  20. sk

    ctrl+shift+t not working on my ubuntu 14.04

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