Tip of the Week: 5 Useful Browser Tips

The best way to access the Internet is to use a web browser. Today, we’ll discuss five of the most helpful basic tricks we can think of to help you make the most of your web browser.

Close a Tab
Again, keep in mind that when we say “basic,” we mean it. You can close a tab by clicking on the little “x” at the edge of the browser. You can also close a tab by clicking on it with the mouse wheel, a technique known as “middle-clicking.” This might not make much of a difference in the long run, but it’s certainly easier to close multiple tabs this way than by clicking on each individual “x.”

Quick Address Bar
If you ever want to visit a different website or search for something with a search engine, you can just type something in the address bar at the top of your browser window. While you can click in the address bar, you want to keep as many options in mind as possible. You can try pressing F6, Alt+D, or Ctrl+L to all do the same thing. It will bring you to the address bar and highlight its contents, as well as give you a chance to continue typing.

Viewing Slideshows or Multi-Page Articles
You know those annoying articles that look like slideshows? It can be a major pain to view them all one after another. You can turn it into one page so you don’t have to fight the website just for the information you need. To get started, just try to print the page. You can either click Print or use Ctrl+P to start it up. This provides a print preview of the page, but more importantly, you’ll have an uninterrupted view of the slideshow.

Highlighting More Accurately
Highlighting text online can be tricky, as it requires that you click and drag from a starting point to an ending point. You might accidentally highlight too much or too little, resulting in your text being an inaccurate representation of what you want. Instead of worrying about whether or not you’ll copy too much of the text, you can click on the starting point of the selection and shift-click the end point of the text. This selects all of the text between two points.

Toggle to Full-Screen Mode
Productivity can be tough when the Internet is filled with so many distractions, and that’s not even mentioning all of the difficulties you might have with other workstation software or tools. You can set your window to full-screen mode to help you focus. To do this, you just have to press F11, and it can be toggled on or off this way.

Can you think of a few keyboard shortcuts for use in a browser? Let us know in the comments.