Open Websites Faster With Firefox Shortcuts

Are you a Firefox user? If not, why not? Only joking, there might be a hundred reasons why you have not made the switch, or perhaps you are a devoted Opera user. Just tell me you have ditched Internet Explorer, even with tabbed browsing in version 7, it’s still not as foxy as other browsers. Anyway, back to the point. If you are an FF, then here’s a neat little trick that I had not come across before until very recently. In fact, I’d actually started looking for an extension or plugin to do the job, when I spotted a site discussing how the feature is already built into Firefox. So, you are by now demanding, what is this time-saving feature? Bookmark keyboard shortcuts, that’s what!

With a bookmark shortcut you can jump to any site for which you have defined such a shortcut simply by jumping to the address bar (Control-L), typing the shortcut into the address bar (it is quickest if you make it a single letter) and hitting return.

So, how do you set them up. Visit the site for which you wish to create the shortcut, and save it to your bookmarks (Control-D), in your bookmarks manager or bookmarks sidebar (Control-B to open), find the bookmark and right-click it and select the Properties menu entry, tab to the box labeled “Keyword” and choose the shortcut. E.g. Bookmark Sciencetext.com and use the keyword “st” (or just “s” if you like). Test it with a Control-L, type “st” (without the quotes) and hit the return key. The URL will be filled in automatically and you will be transferred to the Sciencetext site almost instantly. Clever, huh?

Want something even more clever? Do a search on any search engine (or indeed any form filling page) and right-click in the search box, the context menu appears. See that “Add a keyword for this search…”? Click that and the Add Bookmark dialog appears, choose a name, include a keyword (as above) and hit okay.

Now, do a Control-L and enter your search bookmark keyboard keyword followed by a space and the actual search terms you wish to use, hit return and Firefox will almost miraculously take you to the results page for the search engine you bookmarked.

There are other ways to manipulate these live bookmarks, but I will leave it to you to look at the properties and figure out how you might tweak them further.