5.02.2008

Basic Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts

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Power users (lazy people) love keyboard shortcuts and we have a semi exhaustive list of the common ones here. The most important ones (in my opinion) are near the top while the more benign ones are closer to the bottom. If i have missed anything that you think is important be sure to let me know.

To use the keyboard shortcuts hold down CTRL and press one of the following:

T Opens a new tab and takes the focus to the new tab.

O Open Local File. This is one of the biggest changes from IE where both Ctrl-O and Ctrl-L opened a dialogue box for a URL.

L Changes focus to the Address bar.

Tab Scrolls through the tabs from current window towards the right. Loops back to the first tab when rightmost tab is reached.

1..0 The numbers 1 to 0 takes the focus to Tab 1 to 10.

N Opens a new window like IE.

W A tab or if there are no tabs, close the window.

B Open bookmark sidepanel.

D Bookmark current page.

H Brings up the history dialogue box on the right. Useful if you closed a page accidentally and forgot the URL. Or to make sure your kids are not looking at porn.

U Show page source.

Y Open downloads window.

K Focus goes to search bar

Some of the more common shortcuts just for the heck of it.

R Refresh current page
F Find in page
G Find Again (used in conjunction with Ctrl F)
J Page Info (same as properties in IE)
- Decrease font size
+ Increase font size
S Save current page to disk
P Print current page
A Select All

A note about copy and pasting in Firefox; it is not integrated as closely as IE and the Office Suite for better or worse. For example copying the contents of a page directly in IE and pasting into Word for example keeps the formatting most of the time. Doing the same thing with Firefox results in plain text being copied over.

*edit An astute reader has pointed out another shortcut, "/" just the slash, not brackets which activates an incremental search; it will go to the first instance of the string that is typed in. Hit F3 to find again or hit ESC to cancel the search.

A more specific version of the incremental search is "'" which only finds links with the string entered.

*edit July 26th 2004 Thanks to August who pointed out yet a few more shortcuts as well as a small note - increasing the font size is the = and + key an would more correctly be CTRL =

F5 - refresh page
F6 - Same as CTRL-L, focus is taken to the address bar
CTRL Y - Open up the downloads window
CTRL K - Focus is taken to search bar

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