Firefox tricks

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Tabbed browsing

A lot of people like using tabs as they normally would windows. It's a much less cluttered way to have a lot of documents open.


To open a link in a new tab, middle-mouse-click it or Ctrl-click it.


To switch tabs from the keyboard, use Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab.
(Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDown also work, but may sometimes scroll the viewed pages)
. To close tabs, middle-click the tab, or use Ctrl-W.
Note that once you are used to that, you could remove the red X close buttons -- I find them cluttery, and that I sometimes accidentally click them instead of the tab. See the about:config section below.


Note: FF2 and later will restore your tabs (including form values) on crashes and terminations, so you don't have to worry about losing things you had open.
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Lucky Search

Just type a few words in the address bar. When what you type here doesn't look like an address to interpret, firefox will do a Google 'I'm feeling lucky' search, i.e. go to the top-ranked site for the search.

It works quite well for things where

  • any of the top sites will probably do (say
    exchange rate
    ),
  • the phrase is pretty identifying of the top page in mind (say
    google sets
    or
    imdb tank girl
    , or even
    python re
    ).

It can beat bookmarks for the major things you consistently use.


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The bookmarks toolbar

At one point, my firefox looked like this
Enlarge
At one point, my firefox looked like this

The bookmarks toolbar is, well, a toolbar, that contains a subset of your bookmarks, those in the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder.

It's nice for everything you want to either return to regularly or not forget. I've used it for links to webmail, blogging, pages for courses, last.fm, hobby things, "things to read" collection and more.

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Keyword searches / Quick Searches

Keyword searches are one-word shortcuts, and you can create them for any search field.


For example, go to IMDB, right click the search field and choose 'Add Keyword for this Search', and put eg. 'imdb' for the keyword. Now you can clear the address bar and type
imdb fifth element
,
imdb cary grant
or some other search, and it will act as if you went to imdb and did a search.
(Note: I use Ctrl-L to go to the address bar, which also selects all text so will replace text with what you type. It'a a little faster.)

I search a lot, so it saves me a lot of surfing to the respective websites first. Using gg for Google is kneejerk for me now. I also regularly use:


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Extensions

What extensions you want is entirely personal. Some of the ones I repeatedly install are mentioned on Firefox add-ons.

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Keyboard shortcuts

...that is, the potentially useful ones you might have missed and/or aren't visible in the menus:

Navigation

  • Ctrl
    l
    : Go to address bar
  • Ctrl
    k
    : Go to search box

Tab-related

  • Ctrl
    t
    : New tab
  • Ctrl
    w
    : Close tab
  • CtrlShift
    t
    : Open last closed tab
  • CtrlTab and CtrlShiftTab: Tab through the tabs
  • Ctrl
    1
    through Ctrl
    8
    : go to one of the first eight tabs. 9 goes to the last.

Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDown also work, but may scroll the pages themselves too.

Searching

  • F3: Find and find next (more or less replaces Ctrl-F and Alt-N)
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about:config

When you type about:config in your location bar, you can configure various aspects of your firefox. See also About:config entries.


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Tab behaviour

Before FF2, the ways of opening things in a new tab were less nice. They could be configured via the preferences.

Aruably, the FF2 default of having a closing button on each tab makes it a little too easy to accidentally click. You can change this via: 

browser.tabs.closeButtons
  • 0 means 'show close icon only on current tab'
    (avoids accidental closes when selecting other tabs)
  • 1 means 'show close icon on all tabs'
    (the default)
  • 2 means 'don't show close icons anywhere'
    (you can use middle mouse to close)
  • 3 means 'show one close icon, to the right of all tabs'
    (which will close the current tab)
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middle mouse in linux

The middle mouse button has multiple uses, depending on where you click it.

For some reason, the default configuration differs between windows and linux versions, which means that instead of scrolling, middle mouse in the middle of text will paste the clipboard as an URL to be loaded, which is generally nonsense, and generally fails. When you disable that: 

middlemouse.contentLoadURL

...set to false, you get the scrolling behaviour (and so consistency between platforms).


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smoothScroll

This makes mousewheel scrolls, arrow movements and such move the page not instantly, but quickly and smoothy move over to the new position. This makes scrolling more obvious to people reading along, and may be easier on your eyes, just takes a bit more processing power. Look for: 

general.smoothScroll

If it isn't set to true, double-click it. Immediately takes effect.

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