six firefox shortcuts everyone should know

In addition to the interesting article posted on Coding Horror about the five Vista/IE browsing shortcuts anyone should know, I’m giving the same idea a shot for using the excellent Mozilla Firefox browser.

Why? Because keyboard shortcuts aren’t just good for impressing your peers with your l33t skillz as you command your software quicker than the eye can follow, they are also a huge time-save and decrease chances of getting a mouse-arm. Besides, it looks cool, but I said that already.

So here they are:

1. Jump to the address bar with Alt+D.
2. Jump the the search bar with Ctrl+K.
3. Use Ctrl+Tab for browsing through your open tabs. Use Ctrl+Shift+Tab to go backwards. Whoosh! Look at em go!
4. Ctrl+T opens up a new empty tab/page. Next you can jump to the search bar, or address bar to get to that page you wanted.
5. Ctrl+Left Clicking A Link : this opens the link in a new tab. Very handy if you are surfing a blog (like this one) which has a lot of links to external pages (like this one).
6. I just had to add one more. Ctrl+J opens up your Firefox downloads. I have the download window hidden by default so it doesn’t bother me when I start leeching something. A quick Ctrl+J pops this baby right up again and lets me check how long it’ll take to get those sweet files down to my system.

So there you go, ready to impress fiend and foe with your l33t shortcut skillz. Add some more in the comments if you feel I missed an important one. I’m always interested to learn a new trick.