Tips & Tricks using Mozilla Firefox

Keyboard shortcuts tips

It takes time to memorize all of this shortcuts but your browsing technique will be more capable & superb once you learned all of this tips.

• Spacebar (page down)
• Shift-Spacebar (page up)
• Ctrl+F (find)
• Alt-N (find next)
• Ctrl+D (bookmark page)
• Ctrl+T (new tab)
• Ctrl+K (go to search box)
• Ctrl+L (go to address bar)
• Ctrl+= (increase text size)
• Ctrl+- (decrease text size)
• Ctrl-W (close tab)
• F5 (reload)
• Alt-Home (go to home page)

Tab Navigation

• Ctrl+Tab (rotate forward among tabs)
• Ctrl+Shft+Tab (rotate to the previous tab)
• Ctrl+1-9 (choose a number to jump to a specific tab)

Another keyboard shortcut, but it’s not commonly known and very useful. Go to the address bar (Control-L) and type the name of the site without the “www” or the “.com”. Let’s say “google”. Then press Control-Enter, and it will automatically fill in the “www” and the “.com”. For .net addresses, press Shift-Enter, and for .org addresses, press Control-Shift-Enter.

Mouse shortcut Tips

Sometimes you’re already using your mouse and it’s easier to use a mouse shortcut than to go back to the keyboard. Master these cool ones:

• Middle click on link (opens in new tab)
• Shift-scroll down (previous page)
• Shift-scroll up (next page)
• Ctrl-scroll up (decrease text size)
• Ctrl-scroll down (increase text size)
• Middle click on a tab (closes tab)

Speed up Firefox 

If you have a broadband connection, you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. This allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at once, instead of one at a time (by default, it’s optimized for dialup connections). Here’s how:

• Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Type “network.http” in the filter field, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
• Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
• Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
• Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number like 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at once.
• Also, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0?. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

Limit RAM usage. 

If Firefox takes up too much memory on your computer, you can limit the amount of RAM it is allowed to us. Again, go to about:config, filter “browser.cache” and select “browser.cache.disk.capacity”. It’s set to 50000, but you can lower it, depending on how much memory you have. Try 15000 if you have between 512MB and 1GB ram.