Did you know that in Firefox, you can do more with your mouse scroll wheel than just scroll a web page up and down?
Here are a few tips on using your mouse scroll wheel in Firefox that could save you some time.
1. Closing Tabs
To close a tab just place your mouse cursor on a tab and click with the scroll wheel. This is more convenient and faster than clicking the small cross on the tabs, especially when you want to close several tabs.
2. Opening hyperlinks in a new tab
Very often we would like to open a link in a page in a new tab. The normal way to achieve this is by right-clicking on the the link and choosing ‘Open Link in New Tab‘. Here’s a much quicker way. Just click on the link with the scroll wheel. Presto! the link will open in a new tab. You can even click on the Home button or the Forward/Back button to open the respective url in a new tab.
3. Paste URL & Go
Sometimes you would need to copy a link from another source and paste it into the address bar and hit Enter to open the link. There is an easier alternative in Firefox. You can just press the scroll button in the content area to paste, and go to the url. By default this functionality is disabled in Firefox but you can enable it with two simple tweak in about:config. Why two tweaks? Because of a bug in Firefox, the ‘Paste URL & Go’ does not work if AutoScroll is enabled. So besides enabling the paste and go feature you need to disable autoscroll. So here we go. Enter about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Look for the Preference Name middlemouse.contentLoadURL and double-click on it to change it’s value to true.
Also look for the Preference Name general.autoScroll and change its value from true to false by double-cliking on it.
That’s all to it. Here are few different ways you can use the Paste URL & Go feature after you have copied a url.
- Pressing the wheel button in the content area pastes the url and loads the page in the current tab.
- Holding down the Ctrl key and pressing the wheel button opens the url in a new tab.
- Holding down the Shift key and pressing the wheel button opens the url in an entirely new Firefox instance.
4. Scrolling through the tabs
When you have many tabs open, an arrow appears on either end of the tab bar to let you scroll through the tab bar and view the hidden tabs. There is a much easier way. Just place your mouse cursor anywhere on the tab bar and scroll your mouse wheel up and down to scroll through the tab bar.
5. Moving Forward/Back
You can use the scroll wheel as an alternative to using the Forward and Back buttons on the toolbar. Hold down the Shift key and rotate the wheel forward to view the next page or rotate backward to see the previous page.
6. Zooming
To zoom into a page, hold the Ctrl key and turn the scroll wheel away from you. Similarly, to zoom out, hold the Ctrl key and rotate the scroll wheel towards you.
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{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
4 and 5 don’t appear to work for me on Ubuntu 8.04 with Firefox 3.
Ctrl-0 can fix an over-zealous use of the zoom feature.
Nice trick ! works fine on my Firefox 3.0 on XP.
Thank you !
#3 stops #2 from working
STUMBLED!
Very cool, all work well for me on XP and Firefox 3.0.
“The normal way to achieve this is by right-clicking on the the link and choosing ‘Open Link in New Tab‘.”
Really? Do people do this? I know it’s available in the context menu, but I’d never go that far out of my way to use it.
ctrl(+shift)+click is a lot easier.
Yes, all the things you mentioned are very useful. I’ve used them all myself – saves me lots of time!
They are all useful tips. Thank you very much.
Oh wow! this is brilliant, thanks so much! I’ve been using Snaplinks in Firefox to quickly and easily open even single links in new tabs, but this has just opened up a whole world of opportunity! Thanks so much!
I have my middle scroll button configured as the back button.
All of this is great! I still prefer All-in-one gestures for even faster shortcuts. You can right click and hold your mouse down as you drag it up (for new tab) or down (for in a new window) through the link. You can also navigate such as “forward” and “back’ and about a hundred other things!!! It probably souds really complex, but that’s because of how I explain it!! I don’t know what I’d do w/o it. You can add it to Firefox here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12
The 1st, 2nd and 4th features would be more useful… Zooming is very well known for me since the day I started using firefox… This is a very good post… Thanks a lot…
Stumbled
Glad I Stumbled here this is good info!
4th item doesnt work for me. (FF3.0.1)
Creative list…too many folks forget about the scroll wheel, but FF makes great use of it. Thanks.
#3 disables #2 from working, which in my book is far more convenient. So that’s a definite no go.
Great Tricks. Thanks for sharing.
Tip 1 stops working if we activate Tip 3
4 and 5 I did not know. The rest and autoscroll I use all the time. Great tips!
@deepakOne It only works when you have so many tabs open not all are visible at the same time.
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