Navigating Short-Term History


If you've used the Web for any amount of time, you're already intimately familiar with navigating short-term history in Firefox. You know how to go back to the page you looked at previously (click the Back button), and you know how to go forward again (click the Forward button). Through deductive reasoning, you've probably also figured out how to go back and forward more than one page: Just click each respective button repeatedly until you get to the page you want.

Tip 

If you prefer the keyboard, you can press Alt+ and Alt+ in Windows (or image from book+[ and image from book
Figure 6-1: The Back button is lit up, but the Forward button is grayed out.

image from book
Figure 6-2: Right-clicking the Back button opens a menu of sites you've visited recently.

REMEMBER 

If you're using tabbed browsing (see Chapter 7), the menu contains only those Web sites you visited in the current tab. In other words, short-term history is tied to individual tabs if you're using them; otherwise, it is tied to individual windows.

  • Choose the Web site you want to revisit from the history menu.

  • Navigating history more quickly with the Go menu

    The second method of navigating short-term history is to use the Go menu at the top of every Firefox window. Like the Back and Forward menus, the Go menu offers quick access to the last ten Web sites you visited. But unlike the Back and Forward menus, the Go menu isn't tied to any particular tab or window, and it remembers your recently visited sites even if you restart Firefox. In that sense, it's more like "medium-term" history.

    An example should illustrate that this is less confusing than it sounds. Open a new Firefox window and navigate to CNN.com, then to ESPN.com, and then to Google.com. Right-clicking the Back button offers quick access back to ESPN.com.

    Now open a new Firefox window. You can see that the Back button is no longer lit up; that's because you haven't visited any Web sites in this particular window yet, so you have no Web sites to go back to. Even so, when you open the Go menu in this new window, you see CNN, ESPN, and Google near the top of the Go menu.

    REMEMBER 

    Unlike the Back and Forward menus, the Go menu abides by the history setting with respect to how many days' worth of history to remember. (I discuss this setting at length in "Extending, shortening, or disabling long-term history," later in this chapter.)

    In other words, the Go menu is a great tool when you know you visited a Web site recently but you aren't sure if it was in this window or that window, this tab or that one, or even today or yesterday.




    Firefox For Dummies
    Firefox For Dummies
    ISBN: 0471748994
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2006
    Pages: 157
    Authors: Blake Ross

    flylib.com © 2008-2017.
    If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net