Firefox Tips

[#1]

There are a number of shortcuts and tricks you can use for Mozilla Firefox to give you a better browsing experience. Here are a few favourites.

1. Using keyboard shortcuts
2. Changing icon size
3. Creating keywords for bookmarks
4. How to make Firefox load pages faster
5. Quick search
6. Tab keyboard shortcut

1. Using keyboards shortcuts
There are lots of keyboard shortcuts you can use to speed things up a bit when you're using Firefox:

• Alt + Home - Takes you back to your browser homepage.
• Ctrl + F - Find
• Ctrl + D - Bookmark
• Ctrl + T - Create new tab
• Ctrl + W - Close tab
• Ctrl + L - Go to address bar
• Ctrl + K - Go to search bar
• F5 - Refresh page
• Space - Page down
• Shift + Space - Page up

2. Changing icon size
Want to make your Firefox icons smaller than they are? This is handy if you want to free up a bit of space on your screen. Just follow these steps:

1. Click on View and then Toolbars.
2. Then go to Customise.
3. Now tick the checkbox Use Small Icons next to the drop down.
4. Your icons will now be made smaller. You can switch back to the original icon size by unticking the Use Small Icons checkbox.

3. Creating keywords for bookmarks
Instead of going to Bookmarks on your taskbar every time you want to visit a favourite website you can use this tip to speed things up.

1. Go to Bookmarks.
2. Hover over one of your favourite Bookmarks to highlight it. (Your Bookmarks should be at the bottom of the Bookmarks list).
3. Now right-click and choose Properties.
4. Add a short and memorable keyword for your Bookmark into the Keyword box.
5. Now when you go to the Firefox homepage and enter the keyword into the search box it will go straight to your bookmarked page.

4. How to make Firefox load pages faster
This is a great tip I use myself which makes your webpages load more quickly. By default, Firefox is set up to download everything on a page one item at a time and this can slow your browsing down. By tweaking your settings you can make Firefox download multiple things at once instead.
Note: you should only do this if you're confident changing your browser's settings.

1. In Firefox's address bar type about:config and hit enter.
2. In the filter box that appears type network.http.
3. Look down the list until you find network.http.pipelining and http.proxy.pipelining.
4. Click on these individually to change their status from false to true.
5. Find network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. Increase the value of this to 30. Doing this will make sure Firefox loads 30 items on the page at once, rather than one at a time.
6. Now right-click on the screen and choose New and Integer.
7. In the box that appears type nglayout.initialpaint.delay.
8. Set the value of this to 0. This will stop Firefox from waiting to load and display a webpage, instead it will display it straightaway.

5. Quick search
If there's a word or phrase I spot on a website which I'd like to find out more about, I'll usually Google it in a new tab or window. With this tip you don't have to - but you have to be willing for some random search results from time-to-time!

1. Left-click, hold down and drag over the word or phrase you want to search for and highlight it.
2. Now left-click again on the highlighted text and drag it to your address bar, where you would normally enter a website address.
3. Hit enter or click the little arrow that appears to the right of the text.
4. You'll now get a Google 'Are you feeling lucky' search returned on the word or phrase!

Alternatively, you can drag the text you want to search for into the Google search box. This will instantly do a 'normal' Google search for you, without you having to hit 'enter'.
6. Tab keyboard shortcut
Do you use Firefox's tab feature? If so, did you know you can go directly to each of your tabs using a keyboard shortcut, instead of a mouse click? It makes flicking between multiple tabs quicker. Here's how:

1. Make sure you've got a few tabs open .
2. Click Ctrl + the number of the tab you want to go to. I.e. If you've got 5 tabs open and want to go to the 5th one hold down Ctrl + 5.
3. This will work for up to 8 tabs. (Clicking Ctrl +9 will just jump to the very last tab you've got open).