Firefox

Firefox is another one of my favorite browsers. Firefox is a free download. Some people prefer fire fox over IE because they say it loads web sites faster and gives you a larger viewing area. Firefox is also a tabbed browser. Meaning that you can open each webpage in a new tab instead of opening a new window.

To download Firefox click the banner above and follow the step by step download instructions.
Once you have downloaded Firefox open your Firefox browser and we will get started on the tutorial.

We will start with the Main toolbar. The far left button, the back arrow will take you back to the previous webpage you were viewing. If you want to jump back several pages click the small down arrow and you will get a list of recently viewed websites. To go back to one of them click the title of the site in the list and you will avoid clicking the back arrow several times to get back to where you want to go.

The forward button works the same way. If you have been on the web for a while and done a lot of jumping from site to site you can click the forward button to take you back to where you want to be.
Sometimes web pages don’t load correctly or they get stuck in the process of loading.

When this happens click the reload button.
The next button is the stop button. This button will stop loading a page that is taking a long time to load. Sometimes it works better to stop loading a page before moving onto another.

The last button is Home. This button returns you to your home page.

Now we are going to go a little more in depth with Firefox. We are going to start with the file menu and work our way through each menu touching on the items you will use.

Click on File.

Notice in the file menu to the right of some of the selections are Ctrl+ function. These tell you that by pressing the Ctrl button and the letter you can use the keyboard to perform these same functions.

The items you will use most in the file menu are New Window which opens a new browser window, New Tab will open a new tab, Send a link can be useful if you want to email a page to a friend. Click this function and your email program will automatically create a new email so all you need to do is select a recipient.

Print works like it does in IE. I like to select a section of text when I print off a website. That way I can control the formatting better and can get more information on one page.

Highlight a section of text on a website. Then click file – print. When the print window opens in the print range section click Selection. Then OK. Then only the text you selected in the website will print.
That wraps up the File menu. Now moving onto the Edit menu.

The Edit menu has many of the same functions as Edit menus in other programs. The cut function (ctrl+x function if you are using your keyboard) is useful when filling out a form and moving data. This function used by highlighting text then clicking cut. It will remove the text from the current location in the form and then use the Paste function (ctrl+v if you are using the keyboard) to place the cut text where you want it by clicking in the new location and clicking paste. Copy is more useful if you want to copy and paste part of a webpage into a Word document. Copy works like cut but it does not remove the text.