2. Surfing the Web

The following table summarizes the most commonly used navigation buttons every web browser possesses.

Table 9.1. Firefox's Web Browser Toolbar Buttons

ButtonKeyboard ShortcutFunction
Alt-left_arrow

Go back. Returns to the page visited before the current one. By clicking on it more than once, you can go back more than one page, but some pages use automatic redirection so this may not always work. Keeping this button pressed (or clicking on the little black triangle at its right) will show you a list of all the pages you can access through this feature.

Alt-right_arrow

Go forward. Returns to the page visited after the current one. The comments for the “Go back” button apply.

Ctrl-R

Reload. Refreshes the current page. By default, the browser will first look for the page in its cache (on-disk temporary storage space) and use the local copy, if relevant. Press the Shift key while clicking on the reload button to force the browser to fetch the page from the network.

Esc

Stop. Stops transferring the currently requested object and will therefore cancel the page currently being loaded. Notice that we use the word “object” instead of “page” since web pages might be not only HTML code, but images and other media too.

 

Home page. Returnsyou to the default Firefox home page which you can set through the Edit+Preferences->General sub-menu.

 

Engines. Filling this field with a keyword (such as Linux) will send for a request in one of the predefined search engines, such as Googletm, Yahoo! and Creative Commons. By clicking on the Googletm logo, you can even customize your engines by clicking on Add Engines.