Three Ways to Get Much More Out of Firefox

Market researchers generally peg the market share of the Mozilla Firefox browser at around 10 to 15 percent, but among web workers, I’m positive that the share is much higher. The more you know about how the web works, the more you appreciate the security–and more benefits–that Firefox provides. If you, as I do, work in Firefox all day, this post will round up three ways for you to get much more out of the browser.

Use Extensions. This blog has done some excellent coverage of Firefox extensions. Firefox was designed from the ground up to work with extensions (mini applications that add new features), because a small, guerilla team produced the product in the hopes that developers would help improve it. Among useful extensions you can deploy, Faviconize Tab will turn your browser tabs into tiny, svelte representations so that you can get 40 or 50 tabs displayed at once. Likewise, MenuX gives you a brand new interface to use by virtue of toolbars that aggregate far more features than the default toolbars.


Tune Up Your Browser. I recently did a post on FireTune, which I think is the absolute best utility for improving Firefox’s performance. I’m serious, unless you have a very slow computer and/or slow Internet connection, run FireTune. One of the quirks of Firefox is that it’s designed to work even with slower computers, so, by default, it does funky things like waiting before it even tries to render a page. Firetune takes these features out and makes the browser work substantially faster.

Use Keyboard Shortcuts. Some users of Internet Explorer use keyboard shortcuts, but many Firefox users don’t realize that the browser comes with some unique keyboard shortcuts that can make life easier. Here are a few that I use all the time:

Increase and Decrease Text Size. You can instantly decrease the size of text on a Firefox page by hitting Ctrl+hyphen, which is useful for getting more of an aerial view than usual. Crtl+Plus will increase the size of the text again.

Go Full Screen. To display any page you’re browsing in full screen mode, hit F11. Hitting F11 again will return it to normal size.

Save Pages as Files. To save any web page you’re looking at as a file, hit Ctrl+S.

Start New Tabs. Many people use Firefox’s tabbed browsing very haphazardly. To open a new Tab, hit Ctrl+T. Then enter in whatever URL you want for that tab. You can use Ctrl+Tab to switch between tabs.

Build Your Bookmarks. Hit Ctrl+D and click OK to add any page you’re viewing as a bookmark.

View Your History. Hit Ctrl+H to view your browsing history at the side of your screen.

Quickly Get to Downloaded Files. Hit Ctrl+J to pull up Firefox’s Download Manager. Within Download Manager, you can click on the folder for your downloads to see them.

Do you have any good Firefox tips or know of any good extensions?

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