Tips & Tricks: Firefox 3
Know Where You’re Going
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You can set Firefox to tell you when the site you’re viewing redirects to another site—sometimes you may end up far from where you want to be. To enable this, go to Tools > Options (or Edit > Preferences if you’re using Linux) > Advanced. Under General, check the box against Warn me when sites try to redirect or reload the page. Henceforth, you’ll get a warning bar every time a site redirects you.
Create Your Own Smart Bookmarks
Firefox keeps a record of sites you visit often, and generates a list of “Smart Bookmarks” that you can access from the Bookmarks toolbar. You can create your own list of smart bookmarks using custom queries instead of URLs as well. Right-click on the Bookmarks toolbar and choose New Bookmark. Use a descriptive name for the bookmark, and under Location, enter one of the queries below (whichever suits your fancy, or tweak them to get the results you want):
lFor your 10 Most Visited Sites:
place:queryType=0&sort=8
&maxResults=10
lFor your 10 Most Recent Bookmarks:
place:queryType=1&sort=12
&maxResults=10
lFor your 10 Most Visited Sites with “thinkdigit” in them:
place:queryType=0&sort=8
&maxResults=10&terms=thinkdigit
Here’s all the information you need to build these queries:
sort options
0—Natural bookmark order
1—Sort by title, A-Z
2—Sort by title, Z-A
3—Sort by visit date, most recent last
4—Sort by visit date, most recent first
5—Sort by URI, A-Z
6—Sort by URI, Z-A
7—Sort by visit count, ascending
8—Sort by visit count, descending
9—Sort by keyword, A-Z
10—Sort by keyword, Z-A
11—Sort by date added, most recent last
12—Sort by date added, most recent first
13—Sort by last modified date, most recent last
14—Sort by last modified date, most recent first
17—Sort by tags, ascending
18—Sort by tags, descending
19—Sort by annotation, ascending
20—Sort by annotation, descending
queryType options
0—Search only History
1—Search only Bookmarks
2—Search both
maxResults is the maximum number of results you want.
Tag Your Bookmarks
While we’re on the subject of bookmarks, you should also know that when you create a new bookmark, you now have the option to tag it—you could tag bookmarks relating to your upcoming holiday with “Monsoon Trip”, for example. Make sure you separate each tag with a comma. Now, when you type a tag into Firefox’s address bar, the bookmarks with that tag will come at the top of the list.
Find Faster
Instead of using [Ctrl] + [F] to find a word in a page, you can use Firefox 3’s new Quick Find to search within a page—just hit [/] to begin. You can also eliminate this step by enabling Type Ahead Find. To enable it, type about:config in the address bar, and in the configuration page, look for accessibility.typeaheadfind. Double-click on it to set it to True. Now, to search for a word in a page, just start typing it, and quick find will find it for you. If you only want to look for links, also enable accessibility.typeaheadfind.linksonly (if you prefer using a shortcut instead of this, hit ['] to start Quick Finding links). When Quick Find has found your link, just hit [Enter] to visit it.
Richer Results?
When you begin typing in Firefox’s address bar, the results are a lot smarter than just a list of previously visited sites. To increase the number of these smart (or rich, as they’re called) results, open about:config in a new tab, and use the filter to search for browser.urlbar.maxRichResults double-click on it to change the value to anything you want.
Delete Meaningless Results
If you’ve mistyped a URL and visited it, Firefox will still bring it up in your rich results—clearly, you don’t want that happening. To get rid of the entry, enter the URL till you see the one you don’t want, use the down arrow to select it and hit [Delete] (on the Mac, you’ll need to use [Shift] + [Delete]). You’ll never see that URL in your rich results again.
Ring In The Old
If you don’t like Firefox’s rich results (displayed in what is actually called the AwesomeBar), you can use the Oldbar extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227) to get back to the old “URLs only” address bar.
Gmail For mailto: Links
The ability to assign protocol handlers programs that’ll accept links from different protocols like ftp, mailto and so on—isn’t new, but thanks to Google’s love for Firefox, you can now assign Gmail as the default e-mail handler for mailto: links. Open Gmail in a new tab. In this same tab, enter this JavaScript snippet: javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler(“mailto”,”https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s”,”Gmail”). You’ll see a warning bar at the top of the page, asking you whether you want to add Gmail as the default mailto handler. Select Add Application, and you’re done!
Opera-like Searching
When you type a search term in Firefox’s address bar, you’ll either get an error or be taken to the “I’m feeling lucky” Google result for that term. It’s annoying that you’d have to change focus to the search box, when both Opera and IE support searching from the address bar itself—in Opera, you can precede the search term with “g” to use Google, “y” to use Yahoo, and so on. To get this in Firefox, first click on the arrow next to the search engine’s icon in the search box and choose Manage Search Engines. Select a search engine and choose Edit Keyword. Enter a keyword of your choice—”g” for Google, for example—and click OK. From now on, when you precede any search term with “g” in the address bar, Firefox will send you to the Google results for that term. Repeat for all other search engines.
Don’t Zoom The Images
When you hold down [Ctrl] and scroll the mouse wheel to zoom into pages, you might not want images to resize and get distorted just so you can read text a little better. To enlarge only text, go to View > Zoom and choose Zoom Text Only.
Resistance Is Futile
It’s no coincidence that Firefox 3’s new mascot is a robot. You see, Firefox wasn’t created by humans! Just type about:robots in the address bar to find a secret message from the creators. They claim they come in peace, but we know better...
Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts
Command Shortcut
Navigation
Back [Alt] + Left Arrow
[Backspace]
Forward [Alt] + Right Arrow
[Shift] + [Backspace]
Home [Alt] + [Home]
Open File [Ctrl]+[O]
Reload [F5]
[Ctrl] + [R]
Reload (override cache) [Ctrl] + [F5]
[Ctrl] + [Shift] + [R]
Stop [Esc]
Search
Find [Ctrl] + [F]
Find Again [F3]
[Ctrl] + [G]
Find As You Type Link [‘]
Find As You Type Text [/]
Find Previous [Shift] + [F3]
Web Search [Ctrl + [K]
[Ctrl] + [E]
Windows And Tabs
Close Tab [Ctrl] + [W]
[Ctrl] + [F4]
Close Window [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [W]
[Alt] + [F4]
Move Current Tab Left [Ctrl] + Left Arrow
[Ctrl] + Up Arrow
Move Current Tab Right [Ctrl] + Right Arrow
[Ctrl] + Down Arrow
Move Current Tab to Beginning [Ctrl] + [Home]
Move Current Tab to End [Ctrl] + [End]
New Tab [Ctrl] + [T]
New Window [Ctrl] + [N]
Next Tab [Ctrl] + [Tab]
[Ctrl] + [Page Down]
Open Address in New Tab
(from Location or Search Bar) [Alt] + [Enter]
Previous Tab [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Tab]
[Ctrl] + [Page Up]
Undo Close Tab Ctrl+Shift+T
Select Tab (1 to 8) [Ctrl] + [1] to [8]
Select Last Tab [Ctrl] + [9]
Miscellaneous
Complete .com Address [Ctrl] + [Enter]
Complete .net Address [Shift] + [Enter]
Complete .org Address [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Enter]
Delete Autocomplete Entry [Delete]
Full Screen [F11]
Select Location Bar [Alt] + [D]
[Ctrl + [L]
Select Search Engines
(when Search Bar is focused) [Alt] + Up Arrow
[Alt] + Down Arrow
[F4]