From Helpful

Contents 1 Keyboard shortcuts 2 Lucky address search 3 Tabbed browsing 4 The bookmarks toolbar 5 Keyword searches / Quick Searches 6 Add-ons 6.1 Ads 6.2 Workflow 6.3 Development 6.4 Bookmarks 6.5 Other 7 about:config 7.1 Tab behaviour 7.2 middle mouse in linux 7.3 smoothScroll 7.4 Memory use (mostly for geeks)

Keyboard shortcuts

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

Navigation

• Ctrll: Go to address bar
• Ctrlk: Go to search box

Tab-related

• Ctrlt: New tab
• Ctrlw: Close tab

• CtrlShiftt: Open last closed tab

• CtrlTab and CtrlShiftTab: Tab through the tabs
• Ctrl1 through Ctrl8: 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)

Lucky address search

When you type a bunch of words into the address bar, you can think of this as a Google 'I'm feeling lucky' search.

If you use a clear name, it usually sends you to the right place.

It works quite well for things where

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

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

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.

The bookmarks toolbar

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.

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 , or some other search, and it will act as if you went to imdb and did a search. (of course, a google search for the same will often do something very similar)

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:

• wp
  for wikipedia (there by default)
• dict
  for an online dictionary
• thes
  for an online thesaurus
• a few for specific wikis I like using or edit (like this one)

Most others come and go, say, a html validator, the archive.org wayback machine, looking up music in allmusic, musicogs, musicbrainz, or lastfm, creative common search and such, image sites, video sites, google maps, searching in specific references (e.g. developer wikis, wolfram alpha/mathworld, ),

If you like to quickly use these from the keyboard, you probably want to know about Ctrl-L, which goes to and selects the text in the address bar (so will replace text with what you type). This saves you some mouse-and-delete-button work.

Add-ons

What extensions you want is entirely personal. Some of the ones I repeatedly install:

Ads

AdBlock replaces a good portion of ads with white space

FlashBlock; all flash is replaced with an area you have to click to start the flash. You can whitelist sites you repeatedly visit. Not something you want to drop on unsuspecing users, but useful for the informed that want fewer distracting ads.

Workflow

PDF Download: When a PDF would normally be embedded, this plugin offers you the option of downloading it (and a few other features).

It seems that you may have to disable the Acrobat plugin (which seems to get priority), and that the Acrobat plugin may re-enables itself every update/install.

ErrorZilla Mod (or the derived ErrorZilla Plus): When a site cannot be reached, instead of an error page, you get one suggesting other ways of getting (possibly outdated) content, such as the Google Cache and the internet archive Wayback machine, and a few more technical options. Note that there are a number of similar plugins, such as 'Wayback Version History'

ErrorZilla does not do anything for 404 Not Found errors. There are other plugins that send do much the same for 404s.

Development

Firebug (DOM inspector, JS debugger and profiler, CSS tester, etc. Very useful.)

(Extensions to it, such as Firecookie, YSlow, Page speed)

HTTP/header: Live HTTP Headers and/or Tamper Data allow you to see and tamper with the exact request, e.g. to check that cache headers or Content-Type is correct. If you want to inspect for all browsers, you may want to look at the debug proxy called fiddler instead.

ColorZilla: An eye-dropper that lets you get the color from most anything displayed by firefox. Useful for some design / layout uses. (Note that there are a number of similar add-ons)

And occasionally:

QuickFrame makes View Source apply to the frame you clicked on and not the root; allows you to avoid having to go the 'This Frame' way.

MeasureIt: Shows the size of a box you draw onto content. Occasionally a more convenient a way of seeing post-layout sizes than DOM inspectors. (Note that there are a number of similar add-ons)

Bookmarks

Xmarks for synchronization of bookmarks between (to their site). Can be handy when you work on various computers. (formerly known as foxmarks. Now has versions for firefox, IE, and Safari)

Weave - same idea.

Other

Tab Counter (there are multiple) - to see how crazy I'm being

TinEye - allows a "Where else does this image appear" search.

about:config

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

Tab behaviour

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

Arguably, the FF2 default of having a closing button on each tab makes it a little too easy to accidentally close tabs you're not working with. 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)

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).

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.

Memory use (mostly for geeks)