Firefox Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 2. Ten Ways to Navigate to a Web Page

There are a million ways to move from the
current web page to the next one. This hack describes 10 such
ways.

Here's how to surf, Firefox style. Chapter 4 covers many ways to use extensions to
increase the pleasure and convenience of surfing the Web. This hack
explains what Firefox can do without modification.

1.4.1. Click on a Link

It's not rocket science: left-click on a link, and
the current page is replaced with the link's page.
If you right-click (Command-click on the Mac), you can open that new
page in a new window or a new tab, or you can put the link itself
into a bookmark or into the copy-and-paste
buffer.

1.4.2. Click on a Bookmark Icon

Click any
bookmark or bookmark menu item on the
Bookmarks toolbar, and you're off to the link that
bookmark represents. Bookmarks are complex little beasties, though.
See [Hack #3] for a way to get
through your many bookmarks. See [Hack #33] if you want
to become a bookmark power user.

1.4.3. Put Something in the Location Bar

You can type all kinds of things into the
Location bar where the URL of the current
page is displayed. If you start typing a URL, Firefox will
auto-complete it, providing you with a drop-down list of candidates.
Firefox can even complete an unknown URL for you if you press the
right combination of Control, Shift, and Enter keys. Press Enter or
click the Location bar icon to start the page fetch.

1.4.4. Pick Something from Your History

There are many
history mechanisms beyond the big Forward
and Back buttons. See [Hack #3]
for an introduction to Firefox's history features.

1.4.5. Copy and Paste

The standard Xerox PARC/Apple Macintosh cut, copy, and paste keyboard
combinations are available in Firefox. They are Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and
Ctrl-V, respectively. You can copy a URL from a non-Firefox
application and paste it into the Location bar. (You can give that
bar's input field the focus by clicking on it.) You
can also copy a link's URL by calling up the context
menu with the mouse. You can copy and paste that URL within Firefox
or into another application.

Under Linux, if you use a multislot copy-and-paste buffer tool, you
can stick as many URLs into that set of clipboards as you want. To
copy URLs from a terminal emulator window under Linux, such as
xterm or gnome-terminal, just
highlight the text. There's no need to explicitly
choose Copy in this case. Paste into Firefox as you normally would.

1.4.6. Caret Browsing

For people with poor sight and for those that prefer a
word-processing interface, a normal Firefox window can be made
caret-enabled. The
caret symbol is the blinking vertical bar
that suggests an insertion point: |. Press F7 to
turn it on or off. While it's on, you can navigate
around the document using the arrow keys or with the assistance of a
screen reader that relies on the caret. Just press Enter when the
caret is over a link. You can't edit anything at the
caret unless it moves into a text field.

1.4.7. Drag and Drop

Firefox allows you to drag URLs around the main window. You can drag
bookmarks from the Bookmarks toolbar to the location bar for opening
or drag links in a displayed HTML page to the Bookmark or Location
toolbars.

You can also drag plain text to the Location bar. To do so, first
display a web page that has a URL stated in plain text, not just
embedded in a link. The text might literally say
http://www.yahoo.com. Highlight the text by
left-clicking and dragging across it until it's all
selected. Release the mouse button, and then drag the highlighted
text onto the input field in the Location toolbar. The highlighted
text appears in that text field when you release the mouse, ready to
be retrieved from the Web. You can do this trick with non-URL text as
well, but that makes sense only if you have keyword bookmarks set up
[Hack #33] .

1.4.8. Use the Menu Bar

Lots of web pages and web sites are hidden behind
Firefox's menu system. The Go and Bookmarks menus
provide immediate access to recent pages. The various
FileOpen options let you type in something useful. The Help
menu options all provide locally stored web pages. The Tools menu
leads to a set of dialog boxes and windows that let you interact with
Mozilla's support sites for themes, extensions, and
plug-ins. Finally, there are a few hidden Easter eggs to discover.
Technically, they're not Easter eggs, because
they're well documented diagnostics that are
important for web developers and other technical people. Try typing
these URLs, just for starters:

about:buildconfig
about:cache
about:plugins

1.4.9. Switch Between Windows and Tabs

When you already have many pages
displayed,
it's easy to toggle between them. You can cycle
between whole windows with standard operating system features, such
as
Alt-Tab
on Windows or panels under X11 on Unix. If you have activated tabbed
browsing and several tabs appear in the current window, then just
press Ctrl-Tab to cycle between them.

1.4.10. Use Accessibility Devices

Firefox's accessibility to disabled people is
improving all the time. Part of accessibility depends on web pages
being correctly designed. If the correct design is in place, then
accessibility depends on the features of the browser. Firefox
provides basic
accessibility options via the Alt and Tab
keys (on Microsoft Windows). Once Alt is pressed,
it's possible to navigate the menu system using a
simple and limited range of keystrokes (the arrow keys). Once Tab is
pressed, it's possible to navigate all the input
widgets on the browser and in the currently displayed page. Both
provide such simple access to the menu system and web forms that the
disabled surfer doesn't need to use a complex device
like a mouse or even a keyboard.