The Best Keyboard Shortcut in Firefox - Type Web Addresses Quickly

Download FirefoxIf you haven’t upgrade to Firefox 3 yet, please do so. The new version is far more responsive and stable that its predecessors.

Another reason for loving Firefox 3 is the way it auto-completes web URLs - very intelligent and something you’ll miss in IE. Update: Firefox 2 users share that this works in the previous version as well.

To get started, press Alt+D or Ctrl+L to move the cursor to your Firefox browser address bar and then try some of these combinations:

To open Google Maps website, type “google/maps” in the Firefox address bar (no quotes) and press Ctrl+Enter. And for your Google AdSense page, type “google/adsense” followed by Ctrl+Enter.

Firefox will automatically surround the word(s) that are before the first slash with www. and .com. IE 7 and previous version of Firefox can’t do this.

And this URL auto-complete works even if you have several subdirectories in the URL. For instance, your Google Apps sign-in page will open correctly if you type “google/a/mysite.com” and press Ctrl+Enter.

If you want to open a .org site, you need to use Ctrl+Shift+Enter. Typing labnol/forums followed by Ctrl+Shift+Enter would therefore open our support website at www.labnol.org/forums.

And for .net websites, the shortcut key is Shift+Enter. So you can view the most popular PowerPoint presentations on Slideshare by typing slideshare/popular followed by Shift+Enter.

Bonus Tip: If you like Firefox to add a different suffix other than .com, open your Firefox settings page at about:config and change the value of key browser.fixup.alternate.suffix to something else like .org, .net, etc.

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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