Keyboard navigation in Firefox's 'Downloads' window

Finally I find the correct keystroke to open downloaded items.

Posted on 2007-02-24 14:07 by Jørn Støylen [permalink]

When I upgraded to Firefox 2, I was hugely annoyed by the apparent disappearance of some of my favorite keystrokes. Especially the dialog that pops up when you enter a new username/password combo at a login page. Before, you could hit R to ‘Remember’ or N for ‘Not now’, but that didn’t work in version 2. Fortunately this was fixed in a later upgrade.

And before version 2, you could hit Enter to open the highlighted item in the ‘Downloads’ window:

Firefox 'Downloads' window

This is a pretty big issue for me, as I download pictures at work all the time for use in the newspaper, and hitting that small ‘Open’ link with the mouse is so much harder and slower than using the keyboard.

I thought I’d tried every keystroke possible (Enter, Command-Enter, Space, Command-ArrowDown, Command-O etc. etc.), but today I found it! Hit Tab, and the ‘Open’ link is highlighted in red, like so:

Selected item in Firefox 'Downloads' window after hitting tab to focus on 'Open' link.

Then hit Enter to open. Tada!

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