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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Friday, December 29, 2006

Going to a website with control-enter

Jeff Atwood inspired me to write this. It's a parody of this Logging in with the Keyboard Post and I've tried to keep it word for word, just on a different topic. Hope you don't mind Jeff!

The standard address bar is in every browser window.

As much as we see the address bar every day, you'd think we would have mastered them by now. Unfortunately, we haven't. Here's what I've observed users doing, over and over again:

  1. Launch IE
  2. Click the mouse to the address bar field
  3. Type "www."
  4. Type "google"
  5. Type ".com"

Every time I watch someone do this, a little part of me dies inside. And I see it all the time.

I'm not just talking about casual users like our parents. I'm talking about our fellow software developers, and other users who work with the computer for most of the day. People who really should know better.

What kills me about this is all the needless, painful keystrokes. You've needlessly entered "www." and ".com" millions of times-- just add a little control-Enter to the mix! I'm no keyboard Nazi. All I want is to save users a few precious seconds of their day as they slog through the endless web pages during their work day. And it's so darn easy:

  1. Launch IE
  2. Click the mouse to the address bar field (or better yet, Type Alt-D)
  3. Type "google"
  4. Type control-enter

See? Wasn't that nice? Now it's your turn to play Keyboard Appleseed and spread the word so your fellow coworkers can spend less time logging in-- and more time getting actual work done.

Sidenote: Mac IE was much smarter in this respect. All you had to do was type "google" enter and it did the rest. No big deal you say? Well you could type "shahine/omar" and it would take you to www.shahine.com/omar. If you try that in Win IE you get http://www.shahine/omar.com. Not smart.

 

Friday, December 29, 2006 1:13:20 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
> Mac IE was much smarter in this respect. All you had to do was type "google" enter and it did the rest.

What a fantastic idea, Omar. Why wasn't this carried forward? Who navigates to "google" anyway? What possible conflict could the feature cause?

I'm not sure why, but CTRL+ENTER just doesn't resonate with me on the address bar of the browser. Maybe because the mini-intellisense of the address bar kicks in really fast, so by the time I've typed "Goo", I can already hit down-arrow, then enter?
Friday, December 29, 2006 2:01:08 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
also work with FF
Dror Engel
Friday, December 29, 2006 4:52:20 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
The reason it works in Firefox is I pestered Blake Ross and David Hyatt, the original Firefox dev's (back when it was called Phoenix) to match IE's keystrokes, rather than Mozilla's. They were much more amenable to this than I thought they would be. I even remember pointing out IE keystrokes they'd never heard of.

I wish I could find that web forum discussion now. It would make interesting reading.

Nowadays, I wouldn't even waste keystrokes typing alt-d, google, ctrl-enter. I simply type ctrl-k and enter my search terms there. Sometimes, I don't even need to hit enter because the predictive search field in FF performs my maths calculations on every keystroke.
RichB
Friday, December 29, 2006 6:41:47 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
It is not just Mac IE that is smart (as you pointed out) but also Safari and Firefox on the Mac platform. I'm not sure if it's an OS level function or if all of the developers that work on the Mac have just figured out something fairly clever. I'm still hoping that we'll see this on Windows at some point but since IE7 and Vista still leave this out I've lost much of my hope.
Ellis
Friday, December 29, 2006 8:35:01 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I do this too but have recently turned on inline autocomplete again - I've always liked it. So now I just type "goo" enter. If the autocomplete isn't accurate for whatever reason, I fall back to CTRL ENTER.
Friday, December 29, 2006 9:08:56 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I used this shortcut for a while but fell back to just typing into address bar instead. Not sure why. Maybe because I rarely type in URLs any more -- I either use common links (i.e. Links) or CTRL-E for google.
Friday, December 29, 2006 9:34:14 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
You don't know how many people I know who insist on typing in the www. saying it won't work if you don't. Or the people I know that insist in Capitalizing some letters, insisting it won't work if you don't.

Sad is what it is.
Friday, December 29, 2006 12:40:55 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

aawoken: Many web sites, including some popular ones, need 'www.' Once a while I type a name, hit ctrl-enter and I get the error message that it doesn't exist. Then I know it's one of those web sites which are not configured correctly and I am tempted to contact the webmaster to get it fixed.
Abdu
Friday, December 29, 2006 7:31:27 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Yep, I know, I was referring to cnn.com and the like.
Saturday, December 30, 2006 12:43:52 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Hi Omar,

Pretty interesting, :)
Did you knnow that in IE7 you can configure another suffix more than .com. I mean you can define another TDL domain but with another keys combination. (Ctrl + Shift + Enter)

If you want to know how you can read a post I've in my blog.
http://blogs.clearscreen.com/dtax/archive/2006/11/17/4246.aspx

Jesus.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007 3:20:29 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I've never found a Windows keyboard shortcut to launch IE. However, you can launch a Windows Explorer with the Windows-E. Type a URL in the address-bar (Alt-D to get there) and it will either launch an IE window (IE7) or display the website inside it (IE6).
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 8:56:40 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
This article would be much more convincing if you used these steps:

1. Move the mouse to the address bar
2. Click the mouse button
3. Type "www."
4. Type "google"
5. Type ".com"
6. Type enter

1. Type Alt-D
2. Type "google"
3. Type control-enter

These steps make the keyboard shortcuts look much more useful. You've gone from 6 steps to 3 steps, a 50% savings! That's much better than the measly 5 to 4 difference.
HeroreV
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 9:25:31 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
On Vista you can launch IE if it's in the QuickLaunch bar by typing "Windows"
+ "Position of shortcut".

In my case that would be Windows+4.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 11:14:26 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
i didn't know about the alt-d shortcut, but hitting F6 does the same thing (focuses and highlights the location bar) in ie and firefox.

also, you can not only do ctrl-enter for .com websites, but also shift-enter for .net and ctrl-shift-enter for .org. this only seems to work with firefox and not ie though. :(
cowgod
Friday, April 17, 2009 2:38:19 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
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