Elias Saba’s Blog

Firefox is by far the best web browser available. Here are five features I use daily that you may not know about that will turn you into a lean, mean, browsing machine.

1. “Ctrl+F” is so last year. All the cool kids are using “/”.
If you hold “Ctrl” and press “F” you’ll bring up the standard find bar in Firefox. Boring. This is fairly common knowledge. What most people don’t know is that if you press “/” (slash) you’ll bring up the quick find bar. The difference with the quick find bar is that it clears and closes itself once you click anywhere or stop typing for a few seconds, leaving you to continue on your merry browsing way.

Time saved by not having to: Close the find bar when you’re done using it.

2. Make searches come to you.
How often do you load a website and immediately use their search box? Well, you can make the search box come to you. If you right click on the search field of any website you’ll see the option to “Add a Keyword for this Search…”. When selected, you’ll bring up an option box that looks a lot like the one used to bookmark a site with the exception of the extra “Keyword” field. This essentially allows you to bookmark a search. Typing “KEYWORD+SPACE+QUERY” will bring up the search results for the search field you bookmark as if you typed your query directly into the sites search box. For example, if you bookmark dictionary.com’s search with the keyword “define”, simply typing “define chide” would bring up the definition of “chide” on dictionary.com.

Time saved by not having to: Load a website’s front page when you just want to use their search.

3. Acknowledge your mouse’s bastard child; the Middle-Click.
Firefox utilizes your mouse’s middle click (i.e., pressing the scroll wheel down), so you should too. You likely already know that middle-clicking a link will open that link in a new tab, but did you know middle-clicking anywhere on a tab will close that tab? This comes in especially handy when closing multiple tabs because you don’t have to keep moving the mouse to the next tab’s “X” icon as the tab sizes keep changing with every tab you close.
Time saved by not having to: Use that pesky hand-eye coordination.

4. Copy&Paste into Google no more!
Highlight any text on a website and then right-click on it. What do you know, there’s an option to “Search Google for…” the text you have highlighted. Well I’ll be a copy and pasting monkey’s uncle!
[UPDATE] - Jeff G, from the comments, pointed out that this feature does not always use Google, but instead uses the default search engine you’ve selected in Firefox.

Time saved by not having to: Ctrl+C, Ctrl+T, type google.com, hit enter, Ctrl+P, hit enter.

5. Show your Auto-Complete who’s boss.
Using auto-complete is a great way to be more efficient. That is, unless your auto-complete brings up dozens of junk-complete options for you to choose from. Next time in the email field of a web form and Firefox brings up a mile long list of all those bogus emails you’ve used in the past to avoid spam, just press the down arrow once and hold down the delete key to remove all those useless “suggestions”. You can also use the up and down arrows to pick and choose which items you want to remove.
Time saved by not having to: Fish through a list of junk.