As I have mentioned before, Firefox is my internet browser of choice. Through the years of using Firefox, I have picked up a few time saving tips.

Anyways, I was watching an instructional video and the instructor was mentioning opening links in a new tab. Tabs are a great feature in Firefox, but there is a better method than the one he was using. He was instructing people to “right click” then pick “Open Link in New Tab”. It occurred to me that many people may not know of many of the handy features of Firefox, and that perhaps I could share some of mine. Here is my better way. If your mouse has a scroll wheel, whenever you want to open a link in a new tab, simply put your cursor over the link and “click”(not scroll, but press down like the left or right mouse buttons) the scroll wheel down. Poof, the link will automatically open in a new tab. You can test the feature on this link. I’m not sure if all mice with scroll wheels have this click ability, but my Microsoft mouse does. This was also handy in that some links would open in a new window, this would force them to open in a new tab in the same window. However, Firefox 2 seems to force them to open in a new tab instead of a new window on its own.

Another handy tip is that if you want to close any tab in the row of tabs, you can simply click the scroll wheel on the tab you want closed. This works even if the tab in question isn’t the one open. No more opening the tab then clicking the red “x”.

If you decide use the mouse gesture add-on that I featured in my blog, you get another handy scroll wheel feature. With that add-on installed, you can move your cursor up to the row of tabs, and “scroll” through them by rotating the scroll wheel in either direction.

Let me know if you appreciate these Firefox tips, and I’ll be sure to add more. I’ll add internet Explorer ones as well if people are interested.