10 Important Firefox Tips & Tricks

One reasons for the popularity of the Firefox browser is the wealth of downloadable add-ons, and the customization options available via the about:config hacks. However, there are many tidy tricks you can employ from within the "as is" browser that can much improve your web surfing experience.

These powerful tips and tricks for the open source browser will have you cruising the web faster and smarter in no time.

So, if you are a Firefox user, then check out these 10 features we have highlighted and, as always, please do share any other Firefox hints you have found useful in the comments.

1. First-Click Bookmarking

Firefox offers a very speady way to add a site to your bookmarks — just click on the star butten icon in the browser's "Location Bar."

Clicking once will add the page to your "Unsorted Bookmarks" folder while clicking twice will open up a window that will allow you to edit where the bookmark should be saved, its title, and any tags.


2. Tag Your Bookmarks for Quickly Access

One way of organizing your bookmarks in Firefox is to tag them with keywords. You can either do this as you save them down, or retrospectively by going to the "Bookmarks" menu, selecting "Organize bookmarks," finding the bookmark you want to tag, and adding in the keywords.

Once you have added a word, such as "news", Firefox will offer this as a tag option in future, meaning you just have to tick the box to add it as a tag to another site.

Once you have set up your tags, typing a tag into the Location Bar will bring up all the sites you have tagged with that word, offering quickly access to sites you visit often.


3. Shrink Your Icons

You can also change how Firefox's toolbar icons are displayed to give you a little more screen space. This is useful when every pixel counts (as on a netbook screen), or simply to achieve a more minimalist look.

Simply go to the "View" menu, select "Toolbars," icon hit the "Customize" option and then tick the "Use Small Icons" box.


If you want to lose the icons altogether, you can follow the same steps, but hit the drop-down menu next to "Use Small Icons" and select "Text" for a graphics-free toolbar.


4. Add Icons to the Toolbar

If you carry out the same actions often, such as printing, viewing your history, or managing downloads, there's a way to add more functionality to your toolbar just simple steps.

Go to the "View" menu, then "Toolbars," then the "Customize" option, and you can drag and drop a number of extra icons to the top of your browser for quick access.

5. Change the E-mail Setting

When you click on "Send Link" in Firefox, the browser will load up your operating system's default e-mail program (so likely Outlook in Windows or Mail on a Mac). But it's quite often the case that these are not the mail programs you want.

You can stop the annoyance of Firefox loading up a default mail program by changing your preference in settings, and it's very easy if you use Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Go to "Tools," menu "Options," "Applications" and scroll down until you see "Mailto" on the left. Now, just hit the drop-down menu and select the e-mail program you'd like to use in the future. The next time you click on a mail link in a webpage, it will load up your preferred e-mail program.

6. Save a Search Shortcut

You can save time on sites you search regularly so that you can quickly start a search process on that site from anywhere on the web. To get this set up, right-click on the site's search box and select "Add a Keyword for this Search."

Once you assign a keyword to a site search, you can simply type "keyword + search term" in your Location Bar to search that website. So, for example, typing "Aspire Magic Soft + Social Good" will search aspire-soft.blogspot.com for that content, once the keyword is set up. This will save you the extra steps of loading the site, finding the search box and entering the term.


7. Change the Font Size

You can ensure you are never left squinting at tiny text on your monitor with an option that forces sites to display text at a minimum font size.

Although it should be noted that this may cause some sites to display erroneously, if textual clarity is more important to you than web design purity, go ahead and make the changes — your optician may thank you for it!

Go to "Tools," "Options," then "Content" and then click on the "Advanced"next to "Fonts and Colors." You can then select a minimum font size from the drop down menu. Rest easy knowing that you will never be presented with a sea of 6 pt. text again.

8. Learn Some Shortcut Keys

There is a whole load of mouse and keyboard shortcuts in Firefox, but we have highlighted the ones we find most useful:

Control + Enter — adds .com to the end of text in the Location Bar

Control + Shift + T — reopens the last tab you closed

Alt + D — highlights the text in the Location Bar

Control + Page Up/Down — Moves to previous or next tab

/ — Quick find

9. Set Multiple Homepages

It's true, you can have more than one website as a homepage. You can configure Firefox to load your webmail, favorite news site and social network of choice as it starts.

To set this up, simply load up the sites you want as your homepages, go to "Options," then "General," and then hit the "Use Current Pages" button.

Now, the next time you start Firefox, you'll be productive from the get-go.

10. Clear a Single Site From Your History

We have all done it — typed "Facbook" instead of Facebook. And now the browser loads up the wrong site every time. However, this need not be the case, as Firefox offers a clever way to delete one site from your browsing history rather than forcing you to clear all your recent activity.

To tidy up any typos in your web tracks, go to the "History" menu,and click on "Show All History," and then type the name of the site you want to get rid of in the "Search History" box. When it has loaded, then just right-click on the site and select "Forget About This Site." Now it's no longer history — it's ancient history.