Getting Started With Firefox

As mentioned on Monday, I recently wrote and taught a class on Thunderbird and Firefox for the first time. 

At any rate, I thought I'd post an excerpt of some of the instructions I wrote for the class. These are not exercises per se, just instructions.

Click here for an excerpt of my Firefox  instructions, including using tabs or windows, and changing the default download location to something besides the desktop.

And here's an additional tip I just picked up. If you close a tab that you didn't mean to close, type Ctrl Shift T  to get it back.

Also:

F6 (or Alt-D or Alt-L) = switch focus to the address bar and highlight address. So you can hit F6 and then start typing the address immediately

Ctrl-PageUp and Ctrl-PageDown = move to next or previous tab. You might find it easier than Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab

Hold Alt while scrolling a page to scroll one line at a time instead of three.

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Comments

[Peter Kolbe]

I prefer to teach Ctrl-L (or Apple-L) to focus on the address bar (L for link or location). It's preferable, I think, because it's more in agreement with the common convention in firefox. In fact, when teaching keyboard shortcuts, the first think I do is show how to look them up under the File, Edit, etc menu. Then I teach Ctrl-K (the search box) and Ctrl-T for a new tab. Btw, Ctrl-L works (however poorly) with IE. But I didn't know Ctrl-Shift-T. Neat! Oh, and one more suggestion: I work in a cyber cafe and I think teaching Tools > "Clear Personal Data" to be invaluable.

[Solveig Haugland]

Clear Personal Data is FABULOUS.

Thanks for the additional keyboard shortcuts!

Solveig

[Niraj Prasad]

Hi, I need help in one regard. In OpenOffice how do you format a given cell in multiple ways. I want some part of the text to be left aligned and other to be right aligned. Also there are some numbers inside the (concatenated) text, which I want to format without decimal format. and all of this must be in a single cell.

Thanks in advance.
Niraj

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi Niraj,

I'm afraid you can't format parts of a cell in different ways. A cell format applies to all of whatever is in the cell.

[Dan Moore]

My favorite FF shortcuts:
* cntrl-w to close a window or a tab
* cntrl-t to open a new tab
* cntrl-l to go to the url bar
* esc to stop url loading
* user defined keywords in the url bar (see http://www.mooreds.com/writing/mozillatips.shtml for more)

[Solveig Haugland]

Thanks for the shortcuts, Dan! Glad it took this time.

I'm definitely going to use that Esc one.

Solveig

[Greg]

CTRL-SHIFT-T is great! I've often kicked myself for closing a tab and later remembering I wanted to click a link in it. There's been a close-tab-undo all this time! Thanks so much!