Half Art + Half Science

10 Keyboard Shortcuts for Firefox that could save lives…the lives of a few seconds anyways.

Firefox has several keyboard shortcuts that can save you time. In order to move to the next level of Nerd-dom, then consider learning these. These are for Mac users. Windows users’ shortcuts will be slightly different. See the link below.

Complete list of Firefox shortcuts.

By the way, for Mac users “Command” means the button with the Apple logo and/or the flower-ish thing, not sure what it’s called. Cmd = Command.

My Favorite Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts.

1. Find. Cmd+F.

Often I find when I’m searching for a specific model number or specific name or word on a webpage that using the Find command makes things faster. Cmd+F to pull it up then start typing what you want to find. As you type Firefox automatically starts searching the page and takes you to the first instance of the search word. Then use F3 to find the next instance.

2. Select tab. Cmd+(1-9).

I put Gmail in the first tab, Facebook in the second, and Twitter in the third. Everything else is after that. Now if I want to jump back over to Gmail from another tab, all I do is Cmd+1 and I’m there. Or Cmd+2 for Facebook, etc. This is also helpful if there are two tabs I’m flipping between often. I’ll slide them over to the first few tabs so I can take advantage of this trick.

3. Open new tab. Cmd+T.

Use this to open a new tab. By default, the cursor is placed in the Location box or URL box. Start typing and Firefox will try to fill in as you type. Hit the down arrow to select a link that Firefox pulls up and then enter to go to that page.

If you’ve opened a new tab but want to search Google instead, then hit the Tab button to shift the cursor to the Search box.

4. Close tab. Cmd+W.

Use this when you’re done using the web page on the current tab.

5. Open link new tab. Cmd+click.

Hold the Cmd button while clicking on a link to open the page in a new tab. When searching for something on Google, I will look through the list of links Google gives me and open the seemingly best two or three pages in new tabs using Cmd+Click. If the pages don’t give me what I want, I go back to the Google search tab and keep looking. This way, I can keep track of what pages I’ve visited.

6. Reload the current page. Cmd+R.

Forget the reload button; use a shortcut to reload that page.

7. Print. Cmd+P.

Prints the current page.

8. Select Location bar. Cmd+L.

Moves cursor to the Location bar a.k.a. the URL bar.

9. Web search. Cmd+K.

Moves the cursor to the search bar.

10. Complete .com Address. Cmd+Return.

Say you want to navigate to amazon.com. Hit Cmd+L for the cursor to move to the Location bar. Type “amazon”. Now hit Cmd+Return and “amazon” is turned into “amazon.com”.

Final note: if you use a keyboard shortcut while inside of a text box or certain fields inside a web page, then the keyboard shortcut will not work. You must click outside the box then use the shortcut.