Make the most out of Firefox with these hidden features

Oct 16, 2019 12:10 GMT  ·  By

Firefox is currently the world’s second most-used desktop browser, and this means Mozilla needs to keep improving the app in a way that perfectly adapts to what users expect from it.

In other words, it’s not enough for Firefox to just provide a solid browsing experience, but also provide users with a series of extras that would come in handy whenever they want to perform certain things faster or easier.

Needless to say, Firefox is a very complex browser, and this is actually one of the things that made it so popular today.

And truth be told, mastering Firefox isn’t something that everyone can do, especially because at first glance, it’s rather difficult to discover the hidden gems that aren’t so obvious when first launching the app.

Today, I’m going to highlight three such simple tricks, and while some might already know they’re there, others would definitely find them super-useful. Of course, you can share your tricks on how to make the most out of Firefox using the box at the end of the article.

Mute tabs from the keyboard

I don’t know about you, but sites with playing media are often quite annoying, albeit features rolling out today and enabling blocking auto-playing media more or less reduce the impact of this issue.

However, there are moments when you just want to mute the tab that you’re browsing, like YouTube for example.

Most of the time I use the mouse because that’s the more natural thing to do, but right-clicking a tab and then muting it clearly isn’t the fastest and most convenient way to go. Fortunately, Firefox comes with a hotkey to instantly mute an active tab:


CTRL + M
This hotkey must be used when you are browsing the tab that you want to mute, so for example if YouTube is playing the media, when browsing the web just press Ctrl + M and sound should be off. Press the same keyboard shortcut again to unmute it.

Search open tabs

If you’re like me, you probably browse the web with too many tabs active at the same time. I mean, right now I have 9 active tabs, and I’m not even doing anything too complex online.

Finding out a specific tab when too many are running isn’t really the easiest thing to do because no, clicking each tab to see what’s in there is without a doubt a frustrating thing.

So instead, you can just search tabs using the dedicated feature that Firefox comes with. All you need to do is click the arrow next to the tabs in the tab bar and use the “Search Tab” feature. Type the name of the site that you’re looking for and that’s pretty much it.

Mozilla Firefox on Windows 10

Firefox Task Manager

In Windows 10, the task manager is a key tool to determine what apps slow down the device and use too many resources.

Firefox browser comes with a similar Task Manager whose purpose is to help diagnose high CPU or memory usage in the browser. Basically, if you feel the browser slow or it generates unusual CPU usage, you can turn to this built-in Task Manager to check the impact each tab and extension has on your system performance.

To launch Task Manager, simply click the Menu button > More or type the following code in the address bar:


about:performance
The interface is pretty straightforward, so you’ll see a list of tabs and add-ons, along with energy impact and memory usage. You can sort tabs by any of these two criteria, so it’s rather easy to determine which one eats up too much memory and slows down the browser.
Mozilla Firefox on Windows 10

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Mozilla Firefox on Windows 10
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