A few foxy tips

A great deal of Firefox’s popularity is due to the ability to personalize it and add all sorts of functionality via add-ons. But there are some nifty shortcuts and features right in Firefox. I asked around here at Mozilla for favorite Firefox features and time savers. The list was huge, but here are some highlights:

  • Session Restore: Never feel the pain again of accidentally closing a website! (Editor’s note: can you tell this is my favorite?) You can recover closed tabs and windows, and even text you entered in web forms, by going to the History menu and selecting the “Recently Closed Tabs” option. You also can set Firefox so that it automatically opens the last websites you visited by going to the Tools menu, picking Options and selecting “Show my windows and tabs from last time” under the Startup section. (On Mac OS X: go to the Firefox menu, then pick Preferences)
  • Crunch numbers within Firefox: You can use Google in the built-in search box (upper right corner) as a calculator. Simply type in the equation (e.g. 243 + 5,234) and the answer appears in the drop down menu of suggested search options (e.g. = 5477).
  • Set multiple home pages: You don’t have to be limited to one home page with Firefox. In fact, I have it set so that Firefox launches both of my web mail accounts – Gmail and Yahoo! mail – when it opens. Learn Firefox has a great explanation of how to choose your start page in the first place. In the URL field enter the addresses of your preferred pages separated by a pipe or the “|”.
  • Maximize or Minimize your font size: Using this keyboard shortcut, you can control the size of your browser font — this comes in handy when reading small fonts. Simply press the “Ctrl” and “+” keys together in Windows (or the “Command” and “+” keys on the Mac) and the “Ctrl” and “-” keys to decrease. “Ctrl” and “0” keys pressed together returns you to the original text size.

What are your favorites? Let us know at blog at mozilla dot com — this will be an ongoing series here and we’d love to hear from you.


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