I rarely use a mouse, mostly because I find it much faster and more convenient. Some things, admittedly are better with a mouse and I thought web surfing was one of them until I found these useful tips/extensions.

The first tip is already built into Firefox. If you want to search for text within a webpage, just hit the "/" key and start typing the keyword. This is just the same as "Edit->Find" from the menu. To find the next occurrence, simply hit the F3 key.. pretty standard. You can do a special search which only searches for the keyword within the text for links by hitting the "'" key (single quote). This comes in very useful for mouseless surfing. To follow the highlighted URL press the "Enter" key or to open the URL in a new tab press "Control-Enter".

The next tip is a Firefox extension called Hit-A-Hint. If you have used Elinks before, this extension basically mimics the "." key. Basically as you hold down the space bar, it puts little numbered tags on every clickable item on the webpage. Hold the space bar down and type the number of the link you want to follow, then release the space bar and off you go to the link you chose. You can also open the link in a new tab by hitting the space bar, then "Control" then typing the number of the link and releasing both keys. It took me a little practice to get that key combo right, but I finally can do it pretty predictably.

new finding - you can also use the "h" key with Hit-A-Hint for a toggle mode with the link numbers.. so you hit "h", type the number of the link and then hit "Enter" or "Control-Enter" to follow the link. This is my preferred way now.

Another really useful, but complicated Firefox extension is keyconfig and its companion, functions for keyconfig (the previous link is a page that tells you how to set up both of them). This extension basically lets you remap all of the functions in Firefox to your own custom keys. For instance, I now have my "h", "j", "k" and "l" keys mapped to the page scrolling functions. This is something I've wanted forever because I'm a Vi user and I am too lazy to move my hands down to the arrow keys to scroll around (and forget reaching over to grab the mouse.. yeah right!) Anyway, this extension let's you do so much customization that I'd caution you not to go too crazy with it. You could probably get yourself in a tight spot if you're not careful.