The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Out of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera (and who knows what else?) I find Firefox to be the fastest and most reliable internet browser. I've been learning shortcuts to make the experience even faster. A full list is here.

Opening webpages

The most useful firefox shortcut is:

• F6 or Alt + D to take the text cursor to the address bar

From here, there's no need to type the full web address of things - if I simply type f and hit enter, Firefox knows me well enough to assume I want facebook. If I type h and press enter, it'll take it to hotmail.

I suppose Firefox keeps a record of how many times you've visited a site, and will give your more frequented sites a higher place in the autofill.

So to open facebook in just a few keystrokes I'd press:

• F6 then F then Enter to open facebook

Another useful tip is:

• Alt + Enter to open the address bar url in a new tab

If you know you need to search (i.e., use google):

• Ctrl + K to put the text cursor into the search bar

Tabs

Tabs are a great invention - I remember back in the day when we had to open new windows just to have 2 webpages open at once. Now I usually have no less than 10 different tabs open at a time.

Here's some basic tab shortcuts:

• Ctrl + T to open a new tab
• Ctrl + W or Ctrl + F4 to close the current tab (why W? I don't know. At least using F4 has some sense, as it's similar to Alt + F4 to close the entire program)

To maneoveur between tabs, there's 3 ways to do it.

With your left hand...

• Ctrl + Tab to go forward a tab (is it fitting that the Tab button is used for moving between tabs?)
• Ctrl + Shift + Tab to go back a tab

...with your right hand...

• Ctrl + PgDown to forward a tab (you can use the right-hand Ctrl button too)
• Ctri + PgUp to go back a tab (a small gripe from me: it's a little unintuitive to be pressing PgUp to go down tabs, and PgDown to up tabs.)

...or you can also go directly to the tab you want, instead of scrolling through them:

• Ctrl + 1 to go to tab 1
• Ctrl + 2 to go to tab 2, etc.

This last method is useful for getting to the first first tabs, but becomes difficult to work out which tab is 7 or 8 (9 takes you to the last tab, by the way). Also becomes unuseful when you have so many tabs open you can't see the first tab anymore, so don't know what numbers the other tabs are.

Other useful shortcuts

There's a very useful shortcut to go back and forth between pages you've just visited.

• Alt + Left to go back a page
• Alt + Right to go forward a page