3 Comments
Posted in:

Mouseless Browsing With FireFox

by
More posts by Shaunna »

One of my favourite blogs, Lifehacker, mentioned a new version of a fabulous Firefox extension.

Mouseless Browsing (MLB) is a Firefox-Extension which enables you to browse the internet with the keyboard. The basic principle is to add small boxes with unique ids behind every link and/or form element. You just have to type in the id and press enter (there is also an automatice mode available) to trigger the corresponding action i.e. following a link, pressing a button or selecting a textfield.

I like browsing without a mouse because I have the perception that it is faster to navigate if you don’t have to take your hands off of the keyboard. Moving around without a mouse is efficient as everyone who uses the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste can tell you.

Some other mouseless browsing keyboard shortcuts for Firefox are:

  • Select location bar: Ctrl+L or Alt+D
  • Select search bar: Ctrl+K
  • Back: Backspace or Alt+Left
  • Forward: Alt+Right or Shift+Backspace
  • Open link in new tab: Ctrl+Enter

Happier surfing.

Comments

  1. Dan Pinnington
    January 8th, 2009 at 1:43 pm

    In IE you can also surf without your mouse. See this article for a list of IE keyboard shortcuts.

  2. Simon Fodden
    January 8th, 2009 at 2:11 pm

    On a Mac, at least, one of the handiest keyboard shortcuts is the spacebar, which takes you one screen down in your browser. Probably does it in Windows too.

  3. Dan Pinnington
    January 8th, 2009 at 3:13 pm

    Spacebar does indeed do the same in Windows (see the article in my comment)- and Shift+Spacebar takes you up one screen.