The most Essential "Keyboard Shortcuts" for Firefox Browsers

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Today, we’re going to look at the king of the internet – Firefox.
Instead of just wildly throwing a list of shortcuts at you, I’m going to give you scenarios where you may use them and you can then see how you can easily remember them. I’ll also only give you what I think are the really important ones, the ones I use on a daily basis to whizz my way around the Fox.
Obviously though not everything in Firefox can be accomplished with a keyboard shortcut.
Installing extensions & scripts, choosing favourites and so forth requires the mouse. But basic navigation and moving around the net can be done solely with the keyboard and that in itself can save you a lot of time each day.

So upon opening your browser, you’ll want to open a tab. That’s CTRL + T. Your cursor is already in the address bar. Go ahead and type the address. Once you’re on the webpage in question, use the up and down arrow keys to scroll up and down the page. Like the page? CTRL + D it then to bookmark it. Or CTRL + P it to send it to the printer. Finished with the page? CTRL + W it to shut down the tab. Move along. Nothing to see here people. Or the page could be annoying you. It may not be loading fast enough so hit the ESC button to stop it loading. Then CTRL + R to refresh the page. Still not loading properly? Then give up. Press CTRL + W to close down the tab. Move on to the next site. If you work on those shortcuts alone and practice until you can go really fast, you will surprise yourself at how fast you can open and close tabs, access, refresh and bookmark sites. This can make a really big difference overall in your browsing habits. To open a link on a webpage, use the TAB key and you’ll see each link being slightly highlighted as you hit the tab key : To open that link, just press CTRL + ENTER and it will open in either a new tab or new window (depending on your Firefox configuration). But on the subject of navigating page links with keyboard shortcuts. By this point, you’re probably accumulating a lot of open tabs so let’s now look at some tab navigation shortcuts. (1) CTRL + the TAB key lets you jump forwards from tab to tab. (2) CTRL + SHIFT + TAB lets you jump backwards from tab to tab. (3) But the coolest one is when you can go directly to a tab by assigning it a number. So the first tab on the far left is tab number one while the eighth tab from the left is tab number eight. So to go to the first tab on the far left, just press CTRL + 1. To go to the eighth from the left, just do CTRL + 8. You’ll be taken directly there. The only limit to this is that after 9, it becomes impossible to do this shortcut as CTRL + 10 becomes impossible to do as Firefox reacts immediately after you hit the 1 key by taking you to the first tab. So if you have more than 9 tabs, this shortcut is out.

As I’ve said before, I know there are a huge number of other Firefox shortcuts so please don’t assault me in the comments if I have missed out your pet favourite. The whole point of these posts is to take what I consider to be the most important shortcuts so that you can learn those ones first. Only when you have mastered the basic important ones can you then move on and learn the others. You have to be able to learn to walk before you can run!
(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger and professional freelance writer. Check out his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

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