Several useful Firefox hotkeys everyone should know

Firefox is a very powerful browser which supports a number of plugins and has lots of settings and tricks. Like every other powerful tool, it supports hotkeys to improve usablity and speed up regular browsing activities. I would like to share my list of must-have hotkeys which can be helpful in almost all browsing scenarios.

Navigation

There are three navigation shortcuts I use daily. Those are:

• Alt + Home - open the home page(s).
• Alt + Left Arrow - go to the previous page.
• Alt + Right Arrow - go to the next page.

Bookmarks

To bookmark pages, use these hotkeys:

• Ctrl + D - add the current page to bookmarks.
• To open bookmarks pane quickly, use Ctrl + B hotkey.

Tabs

It is very useful to operate tabs using these shortcut keys:

• Ctrl + T - open a new tab.
• Ctrl + W - close the active tab. Ctrl + F4 also does the same.
• Ctrl + Tab - switch to the next tab.
• Ctrl + Shift + Tab - switch to the previous tab.
• Ctrl + Shift + T - open recently closed tabs i.e. undo close tab in the reverse order in which they were closed. Every time you press this hotkey it will open one of the earlier closed tabs.

Additional useful hotkeys

• Ctrl + F - find text on the active page. F3 also does the same.
• F6 - switch focus between the address bar and the page content. Sometimes it saves a lots of time. Alt+D also does the same.
• F11 - toggles between full screen mode.
• Ctrl + L - activate the address bar.
• Ctrl + E - activate the Internet search text box.
• Ctrl + H - open the browsing history.
• Ctrl + J - open Download manager.
• Ctrl + Shift + A - open the Add-ons manager.
• Ctrl + N - open a new window.
• Ctrl + Shift + P - open new private browsing window.
• Ctrl + S - save the webpage.
• Ctrl + P - print the webpage.
• Ctrl + '+' - zooms in the webpage.
• Ctrl + '-' - zooms out the webpage.
• Ctrl + 0 - reset zoom level to 100%.
• F5 - refreshes the webpage.
• Ctrl + F5 - force refreshes the webpage.
• Ctrl + Shift + Del - shows Clear History dialog directly.

Actually, this is not even a half of the complete list of available hotkeys in Firefox, but these are the most common shortcut keys I use daily. You might be interested in referring to the full list of hotkeys available for Firefox at Mozilla's Knowledge base.

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