Many are content to spend all day clicking fancy looking buttons or menu items in order to get their tasks accomplished, but those who know the correct keyboard and mouse shortcuts can often get around applications more efficiently: Browsing the web with Internet Explorer is no exception. I want to take a minute to discuss a few useful shortcuts already available in IE6 that will help you get around the web, and then list some great new shortcuts we are providing in IE7.
First: Getting around the web in Internet Explorer 6
Basic navigation
Others:
Some interesting hotkeys you cannot see by simply looking in the menus…
* Shift+Mouse wheel up/down also navigates forward and back, so does Backspace and Shift+Backspace** Did you know that hitting the stop button (or Esc) will also stop background sounds?*** If F5 doesn’t refresh all content try Ctrl+F5. This ensures no content is pulled from the cache. **** In the Preview build we also added Ctrl+Shift+Enter when focus is in the address bar. This works like Ctrl+Enter from the address bar does today but will append a suffix of your choice to the end of the string instead of “.com” (.org, .edu, .co.uk, etc…). You can change the default suffix in the Internet Options control panel.
Note: In the Preview build we have changed the pop-up blocker override key from “Ctrl to “Ctrl+Alt” in order to avoid conflicts with our new “Ctrl” tabbed browsing hotkeys
New in Internet Explorer 7
Now that we have basic navigation down, let’s talk about some cool new shortcuts in IE 7. You will notice that for features that exist elsewhere (for example: Tabbed Browsing) we put effort into maintaining consistency where possible.
Tabs:
Zoom:
* If you are using the recent Windows Vista preview you might notice that the 100% zoom hotkey changed from Ctrl+(*) to Ctrl+0
Search:
Favorites Center:
Great new mouse actions in IE7
Even with all these cool keyboard hotkeys we’ve introduced a few helpful shortcuts for mouse users as well.
Tip: My favorite shortcuts are the middle mouse button actions to close a tab and open links in the background (Those make using tabs fast and easy).
In Summary
Internet Explorer certainly has more than just these shortcut keys. I’m sure you have some favorites I did not mention, but I hope you found something here that will make browsing the web easier for you.
Until next time, keep browsing!
- Aaron