10 tips to maximise your Firefox experience

Two issue ago, I posted something on Explorer 7. It seem that many of them are searching for firefox. Be it firefox 3, firefox plugins, firefox addins, firefox extensions, firefox themes, firefox 3 beta, firefox add on, firefox.com or firefox for mac, I would like to post this from Straits Times - Digital Life."10 tips to maximise your firefox experience"

Want more? 10 tips to maximise your Firefox experience

HERE are 10 ways to get the most out of your new browser.

# 1. If you've been an Internet Explorer 6 faithful, you will enjoy the tabbed browsing feature in Firefox. Instead of opening a separate window for each website you want to surf, you can organise them into a single window for less clutter.
Use Ctrl-T to open a new tab and Ctrl-Tab to cycle through the tabs. Shift and click on a link to open it in a new tab in the background or press Shift, Ctrl and click to bring the new tab into the foreground.

# 2. Been typing whole domain names with the 'www.' prefix and '.com' suffix into the address bar? You can save some keystrokes.
Type just the bits in-between, for instance, enter 'yahoo', then hit Ctrl + Enter.
The complete 'www.yahoo.com' address will be formed and loaded automatically. For www.(domain name).net, hit Shift+Enter.

# 3. Instead of clicking on the Forward or Back buttons, hold Shift and turn the scroll wheel of your mouse forward or backward to navigate through the web pages.

# 4. You can assign keywords to your bookmarked sites - right-click on the bookmark and click properties. You can then load the keyworded bookmark quickly by entering the keyword in the address bar.

# 5. Back up your bookmarks by going to Bookmarks: Organise Bookmarks. Click File:Export. Give the file a name and click Save.

# 6. To quickly change the text size on a web page, use Ctrl and the + (plus) key to make text bigger, and Ctrl and - (minus) to make text smaller. To revert to the default text size, press Ctrl and 0 (zero). You can also change the text size by pressing Ctrl and moving the scroll wheel up or down.

# 7. The usual way to go about searching for text on a web page is via Ctrl-F, the find command. Skip to this shortcut: Under Firefox's Tools: Options, select Advanced: General, then check 'Search for text when I start typing'. Type a string of text and Firefox automatically looks for it on-the-fly.

# 8. Configure Firefox to automatically purge your private data. Under Tools: Options, select Privacy, then check 'Always clear my private data when I close Firefox'. Just underneath this setting, you can also configure Firefox to prompt you before clearing the private data by checking 'Ask me before clearing private data'.

# 9. If you let your browser remember passwords, make them safer by configuring a master password. Select Tools: Options, then Security. Under the Passwords section, check 'Use a master password'. Be sure to use a password that cannot be easily guessed by other people.

# 10. You can configure Smart Keywords, which lets you search websites from the address bar. For instance, if you regularly query Amazon.com to search for books, navigate to the homepage, enter the keyword and click Go. This can be simplified.

Go to the webpage with the search field, right-click the search field, then choose 'Add a Keyword for this Search'.

The Add Bookmark dialog will pop up. Give the bookmark a name, for instance, 'Amazon Search', and a keyword, for example 'am' and save the bookmark.

The next time you want to search for a book, just enter 'am (name of book)' into the address bar and hit Enter.

By Mike Lee

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Internet Explorer 7.0

Tip: Internet Explorer 7

IF You are still clicking on the blue E ico on your taskbar whenever you want to open a second or thired browser window, then you haven't discovered the wonders of tabbed browsing.

With IE 7, simply click on the tab right below your address bar to open a new tab instead of new window. It saves you loads and loads of time.

Another great feature of IE7 is its Zoom function, which lets you enlarge the website if it has small fonts or if your screen size is too small.

To do this, go to the Page tab at the top right hand side, and choose Zoom. You can quickly zoom from 50 to 400 per cent, an instant boost to easy reading for tired eyes.

And if you can't seem to find that Refresh button anymore, it's actually that green up and down arrow right at the top.

Compiled by Oo Gin Lee