If you’re like most Firefox users, you probably use the browser to do a variety of tasks, from browsing the web to reading articles. But what if you want to launch websites easily in Firefox? There are a few ways to do this, but we’ll show you how to do it the easy way using your keyboard.
- Open Firefox and type “firefox://www.url/”. This will take you to the address where you can find a website that’s ready for launch. For example, if we were to open firefox://www.google.com/, we would see a website that is ready for launch with the following text: “Google: www.google.com”.
- To launch a website using your keyboard, just hit “ctrl+alt+f3” or “cmd+alt+f3”. This will take you into an open menu where you can select which website you want to launch (or all of them at once). For example, if we wanted to launch google.com and all of its sub-domains, we would hit “ctrl+alt+f3” and then select google-subdomains from the menu that appeared.
Once SiteLauncher is Installed
After installing the extension it is recommended that you go into the settings first to make any desired changes or modifications. Here you can see the “Launcher Hotkey, Direct to Site Hotkey, & Default Shortcuts”.
To remove a website from the list, click on it to select it and then click on the “x” that will appear at the end of that listing. To change a current shortcut click on the appropriate listing, make the desired changes, and click on the “Revise Button”.
Note: The “Revise Button” will take the place of the “Add Shortcut Button” when modifying current listings.
Make any desired changes to how SiteLauncher behaves, the “Appearance” and the “Effects”. You can experiment with the appearance and effects to make SiteLauncher match up very nicely with your current browser theme if desired.
In the lower right corner you will be able to access the “Advanced Tweaks”…
These are the “Advanced Tweaks” for SiteLauncher. You can return to the “Main Options” using the button in the lower right corner.
The “Help Section” has more information concerning the hotkey combinations used to activate SiteLauncher and the shortcut links that you have added to it.
You can also enable or disable additional visual options/features in SiteLauncher such as grouping related links, mouse support, and custom icons. Notice that there is also an option to import and export your settings…
SiteLauncher in Action
Here is what SiteLauncher looked like in our example browser after some changes and modifications in the “Settings”. We changed the hotkey combination, the websites listed, single-hotkey activators, text size, and padding to personalize it.
Note: You may also use your mouse to click on the “links” in the SiteLauncher window.
If you prefer you can use the toolbar button to access SiteLauncher…just click to activate it. Note that the toolbar button is automatically added after installing the extension and can be easily removed using the “Customize Toolbar Window”.
This is the additional menu that will be added to your “Menu Toolbar”. You can deactivate it in the “Settings” (see “Advanced Tweaks” above).
Conclusion
If you love being a keyboard ninja and want to expand that to browsing a customized list of websites in Firefox, then you will definitely enjoy using this extension.
Links
Download the SiteLauncher extension (Mozilla Add-ons)
Download the SiteLauncher extension (Extension Homepage)
