Seven Steps to Mastering Your Web Browser

Brett Kelly has some useful web browser tips on Bridging the Nerd Gap. Number one is “learn the keyboard shortcuts”. I agree that keyboard shortcuts can be useful, but I’m not keen on what Brett has written.

Anybody who knows me even a little knows that I actively dislike the mouse and studies have shown that the more you can do without taking your hand off of the keyboard, the better off you’ll be.

…

I’m talking navigation whole web pages, clicking links, jumping between fields and cycling through tabs, all without ever touching the rodent.

That sounds wonderful. Appallingly, Opera is not even mentioned in the article as, in my experience, it is the only browser that effectively implements such keyboard control. Here is Opera’s keyboard tutorial.

Opera’s most important keyboard accessibility innovations are spatial navigation of links (shift with arrow keys for two dimensional navigation), and the use of ‘find in page’ to select and follow links. I particularly like the latter. Want to log out of a site? On many sites, type “.log out” then return. The dot is equivalent to command-F. If the text found is a link, return will follow it. Powerful.

Unfortunately, there is a critical problem that undermines this sterling work by Opera Software: most web pages are designed for the mouse. I find that it is usually easier to switch to the mouse when keyboard navigation is strained. I believe switching between keyboard and mouse is the most time consuming part of using the mouse. Fortunately, Opera has excellent mouse shortcuts too.

Note

It pains me to say it, but I use Safari rather than Opera for desktop web browsing. Practically, behaving and looking like a native Mac application are more important to me than superior input methods. I believe my points about Opera’s excellence at input still stand.