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.