Surfing using the keyboard, shortcuts

Author: Michael Maardt, March 2001

Here are some of my best tips to keep your hands on the keyboard.

Try this: Hold Ctrl and turn your mouse wheel button

Navigation

The small arrow keys to the left of the numeric keypad. To scroll up and down a page you use the arrow up and the arrow down keys. Home and End jumps to top and end of page. Of course you will only see this, if the page is larger than your screen

Internet Explorer

I am pretty sure, that you click the Back button in the upper left corner, when you want to go to the previous page, right? Try the keyboard: Alt+Left Arrow (works also in Windows Explorer). I know, that Backspace also does the same thing, but not always: If a form field is in focus (like in a search engine), strange things might happen. Get used to Alt and the arrow keys left and right, if you want to learn it properly :-)

My experience: the keys communicate faster with the browser than the mouse. 

I used Opera for some months, but I could not find out about some things, and I find the options to difficult to get around and understand. Furthermore I really had difficulties to load it. So I went back to IE.

Refresh or Reload?

F5 or CTRL+R to 'Refresh' a page, but careful: If the page is in your cache, you might just 'Refresh' reading the cache, as the button in the toolbar says. Refresh is NOT the same as 

Reload = CTRL+F5 or CTRL+click Refresh-button. Reload reads the page from the server!

Window: Full screen mode or not

I prefer to double click the titlebar of the window. Some people click the icons in the upper right corner. Try double click the title bar - very top of the window. It is possible with the keys: Alt+Space+Enter oder Alt+Space+X

Send a friend a link to a webpage

Open your Email program and make a new message. Switch back to your Browser with Alt+Tab. F6 highlights the address field. Ctrl+C makes a Copy. Switch to your Email programm with Alt+Tab. Put the cursor in the bodytext  and paste the socalled URL (WWW-address) with Ctrl+V in your email program.

Open a new tab often

Ctrl+T opens a new tab. This is useful, when you want to read a page later, but still want to look at some other pages.

History and Favorites

Ctrl+H opens/closes History. A few minutes ago I was on a site, what was it? Look in History from Today, maybe you find it. 

Ctrl+I opens/closes Favorites. shows shortcuts to the pages you have bookmarked.

For both views this apply:

Down-Arrow selects the first item. You 'open' a site (folder) in the same way as in Windows Explorer with Right-arrow. Left-arrow 'closes' the folder. You can speed-search pressing a single letter (more description in Windows Super User). I must admit, that I rarely uses History, but very often Favorites, but not in this way. I press Alt+A, then Arrow down or speed-search, Enter to 'open' a folder and then again Down-arrow or Up-Arrow and in the end Enter. It sounds worth than it is :-) Try it.

Press Ctrl+I and Ctrl+H several times to see, what happens.

Open a new window/tab, when activating a link

Hold Ctrl + Click

which is the equivalent of right clicking and saying: open in new window/tab. Handy when browsing search results. 

'Your' Homepage

Alt+Home: like a click on the Home-Button. Set the Homepage: Go menu Tools -> Internet Options -> Homepage. 

Roll down the adress bar

F4 and use arrow-down, until you get to the site, you want, and press Enter.

Select the address bar

F6

Edit web address

Sometimes you are on a page with a very long address. Maybe you jumped to this page from a search engine, and you want to go to the homepage of this website. The address is so long, that you don't even see the end of it. What to do?

Press F6, press End and then delete backwards with Ctrl+Backspace.

Forms

You have to fill out still more forms. You can jump from field to field with TAB and Shift+TAB. 

Be aware though: a Formular contains several fields, but one link is for you very important: the Submit-Button. A Form is a kind of program on a page. It only waits for one thing: that you click the button or hit Enter. Wait to do this, until you are sure. 

Have you noticed: when you start typing your email address or select the field with your mouse, you see former entries, that you have made in the past? I wanted to delete some of these entries, but could not find out why. No Help from Microsoft.

How to delete those old entries: This can only be done with the keyboard. Select an entry either with the mouse or the keyboard (you can scroll thru your entries with arrow down key), select it and press Delete key. Of course it will appear, if you enter it again ;)

Other tips about easier reading

Change Font size and colors

First try this: Hold Ctrl and turn the Mouse Wheel button, if your mouse has one. This is the same as Menu, View, Text Size - if this does not work, read on:

Menu Tools, Internet Options. Click Accessibility. Most important one is Font size. Try it and you will see the difference, if there's any difference. It depends how the webmaster of the page, you are looking at, has programmed it. If the webmaster has programmed the page or style sheet with a fixed font size, there is nothing you can do.