Get to Gmail in One Keystroke
Speaking of Firefox keyboard shortcuts, reader John writes in:
Noticed a peculiar thing on my girlfriend’s MacBook the other day—I hit “g” then Enter from Firefox’s location bar, and voila, Gmail launched. I have a keyword bookmark on MY computer configured to make Firefox act this way, but not on hers… maybe this is a built-in Firefox “Easter egg”?
Not sure if the g shortcut would be considered an Easter egg, but I confirmed that it works on a pristine Firefox 2.5 profile on Windows, too. Strangely, the dict keyword, which used to take you to dictionary.com, is no longer built in. We’re big fans of configuring our own keyword bookmarks. If you haven’t already, here’s how. Thanks, John!
Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
When you type in a keyword into Firefox’s address bar, it performs a search and sends you to Google’s first result (akin to ‘I’m feeling lucky’).
To test this, do a Google search for ‘g’ and Gmail is the first result.
I’m not sure why this doesn’t work for all searches directly from the address bar – possibly there is a Google algorithm at work that determines the popularity of the first search result?