IE shortcuts
My roommate had a house guest over this weekend and I woke one morning to find her in the office attempting to use a computer currently busy showing football in full screen mode. She was grapling with the trackball, a device she was unfamiliar with. When I walked in, she looked up and said, "Help? How do I get this to stop showing football?" I suggested ALT+F4, since, as we all know, ALT+F4 is the universal command* to close a window. After the TV app had been dismissed, she found an IE window all ready running. She then struggled to use the trackball to put focus in the address bar. "ALT+D," says I. "What?" she questioned. A brief discussion of keyboard shortcuts ensewed, which I shall summarize for you all, here, now**.
Internet Explorer, like any good Windows application, has a way to do everything that can be done with the mouse with the keyboard. They two methods may not look the same, but the end result is always the same. For example, you may have to go into a menu instead of clicking a button. Some things are not easily done with the keyboard. Here is a list of things that are easily done:
ALT+D - Put focus in the address bar, and select whatever text is there
CTRL+ENTER - Put 'https://www.' and '.com' before and after whatever text is in the address bar
ALT+LEFT - Go Back
ALT+RIGHT - Go Forward
BACKSPACE - Go Back
ALT+HOME - Go Home
F11 - Enter/Exit Full Screen Mode
F5 - Refresh
CTRL+F5 - I Really Mean It Refresh (Forces re-download of page instead of refreshing from cache)
ALT+V, B - Toggle the Status Bar
ALT+A - Open the favorites menu; then type the first letter of the favorite you want
F6 - Move focus between major UI elements (Toolbar->Explorer Bar->HTML Page->Toolbar)
TAB - Move focus between minor UI elements (Link->Link in a page, Address Bar->Go Button, etc)
SHIFT+TAB - Like TAB, but the other way
SPACE - Scroll the page down (same as the PageDown key)
These shortucts apply to all normal windows applications, not just IE:
ALT+SPACE, X - Maximize the window
ALT+SPACE, R - Restore the window
ALT+TAB - Switch between top level windows
SHIFT+F10 - Display the context menu (similar*** to Right-Clicking)
Undoubtably there are more, but these are the ones I use almost everyday. If you use these, I bet you will learn a lot more on your own. I like to browse as much as possible without the mouse. The only keyboard shortcut I find too cumbersom is hitting TAB thousands of times (and then ENTER) to navigate to a link on a page with lots of links.
Tell your friends!
* Universal, that is, if you are running Windows.
** I am sure this information exists elsewhere, but from the number of people I see dependent on the mouse, it bears repeating.
*** 'Similar' because its not exactally the same--the menu will generally appear at 0,0 or some such convient location. Make sure focus is on the exact element you would have RClicked on.
Comments
Anonymous
September 07, 2004
I use Ctrl-Enter so much it pains me to watch other people type in the http://www. and the .com at the end. FireFox went a step further and has two more commands:
Shift-Enter: http://www.<text">http://www.<text here>.net
Ctrl-Shift-Enter: http://www.<text">http://www.<text here>.org
These are fairly useful and I hope they find their way into IE.Anonymous
September 07, 2004
Once you've hit Alt-D, what key can you hit to return back to the html if you've changed your mind? (I say to myself, "Oh, I didn't want to go to a different page, I want to keep scrolling with the arrow keys...").
Usually I hit the left mouse button out in a blank spot on the page and continue to scroll with the arrow keys, but there's gotta be a keyboard key for it. (I thought Esc would be the logical choice).Anonymous
September 07, 2004
FWIW, NetCaptor (one of the wrappers around IE that added tabs and popup/ad blocker years ago) had various ctrl/shift/ctrl+shift + enter combinations for autocomplete with com/net/org for at least 4-5 years :)Anonymous
September 07, 2004
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September 07, 2004
I like CTRL+O to open up an 'Open Dialog' and type in what i need to open, instead of going to the address bar.
Guess I can use it together with the ctrl+enter.Anonymous
September 07, 2004
In Netscape, Alt+. used to Stop the current operation, but I notice that doesn't work in IE. The View menu says that Escape does Stop. Many of the other odd keys were of course inherited from Netscape, to assist users in migrating.
Will Help > Tips for Netscape Users turn into Tips for Firefox Users in the next release? ;-)Anonymous
September 07, 2004
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September 07, 2004
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September 07, 2004
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September 07, 2004
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September 08, 2004
F4 - moves focus to the address bar, but assumes you are going to select from history, not type-in
all the alt-+-space commands can be seperated into alt-release-space-release+command-char, unlike any other windows shortcut I know of....
and you left out the most important one, for those without MS keyboards,heh...
alt-esc to bring up the start menu =pAnonymous
September 08, 2004
Xymon-- Actually it is CTRL+ESC to open the start menu, but I get CTRL and ALT confused all the time too.
Martin pointed out the KB article that provides an exhaustive windows-wide list:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;301583Anonymous
September 17, 2004
In response to:
------
The only keyboard shortcut I find too cumbersom is hitting TAB thousands of times (and then ENTER) to navigate to a link on a page with lots of links.
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I use CTRL+f to find the link text I want in the page :)Anonymous
September 18, 2004
Ctrl-F is great for Find, except in Outlook, where for some reason that's forward instead, and you have to use F4 to find. Why oh why did they decide to break what works in every other Office application (or really every Windows application).
Oh well, such is the nature of code.Anonymous
September 21, 2004
What is the shortcut that stops bogus pages hijacking my shortcuts with accesskeys?Anonymous
October 01, 2004
Ctrl-Enter is cool, and here is why... maybe someone can help me out.
In order to access a site using IE 6.0, or AOL 9.0, or my SBC browser, I need to enter, e.g., http://www.sgi.com. Entering www.sgi.com will not work… IE says unable to locate site. This feature has worked for years on my computer, now I need to enter the full website address including http:// every time.
I’ve re-installed Windows 98SE, IE 6.0, AOL browser, SBC browser, I’ve done file maintenance on the computer, went back to default setting for my IE, but nothing fixes the problem.
Thanks, MikeAnonymous
October 04, 2004
for some strange reason this shortcut no longer works but all other ctrl and alt shortcuts work. Has this happened to anyone else and/or can anyone help me restore this wonderful shortcut!?!?!Anonymous
October 04, 2004
forgive my fat fingers.................of course I meant ctrl+shift+enterAnonymous
October 05, 2004
Ctrl-Enter works in IE 6.0, but not for AOL 9.0, or SBC Yahoo Browser.
Still can't get any of these borwsers to go to Website by just entering www.website.com, need to enter the whole string http://www.website.com
Can anyone help!
MikeAnonymous
October 06, 2004
I have the same problem as Mike and it's really annoying could someone please help.
Thanks
DanAnonymous
December 12, 2008
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June 09, 2009
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June 18, 2009
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