Mozilla Firefox is a great browser, but one of its greatest features is one that few people bother to use - keyboard shortcuts. Spending just a few minutes learning the most common shortcuts can greatly increase the speed at which you browse web pages.
Entering URLs
To go to http://www.google.com, for example, press Ctrl+L, type "google," and then press Ctrl+Enter.
| Action | Shortcut |
| Location Bar | Ctrl+L |
| Automatic .com Address | Ctrl+Enter |
| Automatic .net Address | Shift+Enter |
| Automatic .org Address | Ctrl+Shift+Enter |
Basic Navigation
You can access each of the navigation toolbar commands using keyboard shortcuts. They are listed below in the order in which they appear on the toolbar.
| Action | Shortcut |
| Previous Page | Alt+Left |
| Next Page | Alt+Right |
| Refresh Page | Ctrl+R |
| Home | Alt+Home |
| Stop | Esc |
| Location Bar | Ctrl+L |
| Bookmark Current Page | Ctrl+D |
| Search Engine | Ctrl+K |
Tabbed Browsing
In order to open a new (blank) tab, press Ctrl+T. To close a tab, press Ctrl+W. If you closed a tab by mistake and would like to recover it, press Ctrl+Shift+T.
If you are entering an address in the location bar, and would like to open it in a new tab, press Alt+Enter (or Alt plus any of the three combinations listed in the "Entering URLs" section). If you are browsing a page and see a link you would like to open in a new tab, hold Ctrl while clicking the link with your mouse (Ctrl+Click), press Ctrl+Enter after you Tab onto the link, or middle click the link. (Doing each of these will open the link in the background. In order to open the link in the foreground, also hold Shift during each of these shortcuts.)
If you have multiple tabs, you can directly access the first tab using Ctrl+1, the second tab using Ctrl+2, and so on up to Ctrl+8 (Ctrl+9 takes you to the last tab, regardless of its number). To move from one tab to the next, or one tab to the previous, press Ctrl+PageUp or Ctrl+PageDown.
Finally, to start a whole new group of tabs (that is, a new window), press Ctrl+N.
| Action | Shortcut |
| New Tab | Ctrl+T |
| Close Tab | Ctrl+W |
| Recover Closed Tab | Ctrl+Shift+T |
| Open Address in New Tab | Alt+Enter |
| Open Link in New Tab | Ctrl+Click |
| Open Link in New Tab | Ctrl+Shift+Click |
| Select Tab | Ctrl+(1 to 8) |
| Select Last Tab | Ctrl+9 |
| Next Tab | Ctrl+PageDown |
| Previous Tab | Ctrl+PageUp |
| New Window | Ctrl+N |
Searching Page Text
To find a specific word or phrase in the text of a page, press Ctrl+F. To use the various search commands listed in the search bar, such as to find the "Next" instance of the word, press Alt and the letter underlined in the corresponding command. In the case of "Next" word, it would be Alt+N.
| Action | Shortcut |
| Find | Ctrl+F |
| Next Result | Alt+N |
| Previous Result | Alt+P |
| Highlight All | Alt+A |
| Match Case | Alt+C |
Miscellaneous
| Action | Shortcut |
| Bookmarks | Ctrl+B |
| History | Ctrl+H |
| Downloads | Ctrl+J |
| Zoom In | Ctrl++ |
| Zoom Out | Ctrl+- |
| Reset Zoom | Ctrl+0 |
| Full Screen | F11 |
| Advance to Next Link | Tab |
| Help | F1 |
Notes
This list is not exhaustive because I've omitted, for brevity, most of the obvious shortcuts (e.g., PageDown), redundant shortcuts (e.g., Alt+D), and esoteric shortcuts (e.g., Ctrl+Shift+D).These shortcuts work in both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 for both Windows and Linux. (However, there do exist shortcuts which will only work in one version or operating system.) Most of these shortcuts will work in Mac OS after substituting Cmd for Ctrl, Option for Alt, and Return for Enter.
For a more complete list of shortcuts, see the official Mozilla website.
