The keyboard is mightier than the mouse

I usually work with the keyboard in Firefox whenever possible which speeds up many processes in Firefox. I was always a bit irritated that I had to click on a search result after searching on a search engine. This did not feel right and natural.

After typing the search phrase and hitting enter it would be natural to be able to select the first, or any other, search result from the list without having to move the hand away from the keyboard to grab the mouse and click the link.

Several Firefox users must have felt the same way because multiple Firefox add-ons have been created that deal with that matter. One that has not been updated in 18 months is the Search Keys extension which adds visible keys to the search results.

The first result would be labeled 1, the second 2 and so on. Pressing the corresponding key on the keyboard loads the search result in the same tab. Pressing ALT (CTRL in Linux) and the number will open the search result in a new tab while SHIFT and the number will open it in a new Firefox window.

The keys comma and period are used to navigate search results pages. This is not working in all search engines though. A quick test revealed that all keys are still working when searching Google while the comma and period shortcuts are not working in Yahoo.