Gordaen’s Blog

Maybe my mouse skills need some refreshing, but today I (accidentally) learned that I could open a website by middle-clicking an inactive part of a webpage (i.e., not a link). It took me a while to figure this out, but, if I have text copied, middle-clicking will paste it into the location bar (adding the “http://” automatically, if needed; plus it adds the “www.” and the “.com” if no period exists in the copied text) and try to visit the page. See if it works for you: copy gordaen (shameless plug) and middle click off to the side somewhere. If you add shift to the combo, it opens in a new window and ctrl opens it in a new tab. In fact, it appears that you don’t even have to copy the text; you can highlight it and middle-click.

I believe this option is only enabled in Linux, by default, but you can turn it on/off by setting your location to about:config and then changing middlemouse.contentLoadURL to true (to turn it on) or false (to turn it off).

Some other random shortcuts worth knowing: F6 or ctrl+L (and even ALT+D in Linux) will select the location bar. If you type in a word, ctrl+enter treats it like a “.com” address. Shift+enter is for “.net” and shift+ctrl+enter is for “.org.” Typically I open a new tab and then type in an address or partial address, but, if you are already typing it when you decide you want the result to open in a new tab, just use alt+enter.

It can be inconvenient to close a few tabs by clicking on their X’s, so instead you can middle-click anywhere on the tab to close it.

Sometimes I think if I sneeze, I will uncover a new Firefox shortcut (such as shift+scroll-wheel)…