5 FireFox Keyboard Shortcuts
Use FireFox? Well you need these five top Keyboard shortcuts. I use them all at least once every waking hour of the day. Not revolutionary or new, just great and time saving. You may also like to read about two FireFox URL tricks I use just as much.
- Jump to the Search Box – Ctrl(Windows)/Cmd(OSX) + K
- Open New Tab – Ctrl/Cmd + T
- Close Tab – Ctrl/Cmd + W
- Switch Tab – Ctrl + Tab (Windows and OSX) or hold Shift as well to go backwards
- Jump to the Address/Location Bar – Ctrl(Windows)/Cmd(OSX) + L
Aside from the keyboard shortcuts, I use “find as you type” constantly. It comes in particularly handy when you Google for something and end up at a huge page through one of the results. You know there’s a particular phrase on that page somewhere but it’s certainly not near the top. The absolute quickest way to find the piece of text you’re after is to just start to type it. When you do, and as you form the word, FireFox will select the first match on the page. You have to enable this option as it’s not on by default. If you find out there’s more than one match on the page, hit Ctrl/Cmd + F and the usual find dialogue will become available with your phrase already there and the first match selected.
It’s probably worth pointing out that many of these shortcuts are shared between browsers, not all but some. For example, Cmd + W is also close tab in Safari, OSX’s packaged browser and Opera.
hi and thanks for your tips. However I cannot get ‘back’ to work on my Firefox. Please can you explain again? I do not want to change tabs – I want to go ‘back’ on the same tab.
helen
Hi Helen. if you want to go back within the same tab, the backspace key will do the trick. That should work for all platforms FireFox runs on.
Hope that helps.
I love short-cuts and have taught them to me computer students for more than 20 years. So much faster than using the mouse in most cases.
I have another FireFox shortcut I love and that is Control+U on Windows, sorry not sure what it would be on the Mac, but likely the same thing.
Control+U opens the source code for the page you are currently browsing, very useful for the SEO stuff.
That’s a great shortcut James, like you say very usefull for SEO or just figuring out how a designer achieved a certain effect. It’s command + U on a Mac.
Thanks for the tips.
One thing that bothers me about Firefox is the new window command does not open a new window like in explorerer that has the current URL and viewed page history.
Is there a command to get this?
That would be most helpful!
Thanks
Hi Greg,
There isn’t an option to do that in FireFox as far as I can tell. Your best bet may be to try something like Tab Mix Plus which provides all sorts of extra options for tabbed browsing.