Firefox 101: Mouse Shortcuts You’re Going to Love

Mozilla Firefox is currently the second most-used browser worldwide on the desktop, and it all happens for good reason. Firefox isn’t only fast and secure, but also comes with plethora of options, allowing users to heavily customize it to better fit their needs.

By default, Firefox comes with a set of built-in hotkeys that makes it possible for users to access certain features and to stuff much faster, all by pressing keys on the keyboard and without having to click through bloated menus.

And truth be told, everyone uses these hotkeys.

I, for one, can’t remember the last time I opened or closed a tab with the mouse, simply because it’s much faster to do it by pressing CTRL + T and CTRL + W on the keyboard. And because I have my left hand on the keyboard all the time, it’s not only faster, but also more convenient to use Firefox this way.

But at the same time, there are also mouse shortcuts that make things so much faster.

I agree, relying on keyboard shortcuts makes more sense for everyone, but on the other hand, doing certain things with the mouse can also prove to be rather convenient, especially when you don’t keep a hand on the keyboard.

For example, in addition to the CTRL + W hotkey that I use to close tabs, I do the same thing using a middle mouse click on a tab, and this comes in handier when I close multiple taps in a row.

Firefox comes with a pretty decent collection of mouse shortcuts, but there are so many third-party extensions out there that let you configure hotkeys and gestures for actions that aren’t supported by default. One of them is Shortkeys, although it’s important to note that this one works only on loaded pages, and not on new tab pages and addon pages.

Getting back to the mouse shortcuts in Firefox, here is my top 3 (make sure you scroll to the end of the article to find the full list of mouse shortcuts in the browser):  

The default mouse shortcuts in Firefox cannot be changed, as Mozilla doesn’t offer a configuration screen for these pre-defined settings – but as I said earlier, you can turn to add-ons to enable further shortcuts should you want more advanced functionality like gestures and additional actions that can be performed in the browser without touching the keyboard.

The full list of mouse shortcuts in Firefox (as configured by Mozilla) is this: