Brace yourselves you young pups, but computers in the “old days” (ok the very old days) did not have a need for a mouse. You typed everything! All commands, everything you wanted to do needed to be done via the keyboard.
In my opinion, this is part of the reason that many applications still have what we call keyboard shortcuts today. That, and it is faster for many to simply not lift their hands off of their keyboard to make the move to the mouse. A simple keyboard combo can take you where you need to go and you are typing straight away again.
Today, I’m going to share a couple of useful keyboard shortcuts that work the same in both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer:
1. Move your cursor to the address or location bar – “Alt + D”
This keyboard shortcut takes your cursor and puts it in the bar where you type in a web page address. Very useful if your cursor is located on the web page itself within a text box. This occurs on the MSN website with the Bing search engine bar.
2. Move your cursor to the search bar – “Ctrl + E”
This keyboard shortcut takes your cursor and puts it in the bar where you can type a web search within your browser.
Note that by hitting “Tab” or “Shift-Tab” after you have used one of these keyboard shortcuts, you can move the cursor between the two bars.
If you are interested in more keyboard shortcuts for Firefox and Internet Explorer, just go to google and search. The first hits that come up are from Microsoft and Mozilla with a documented list.