10 Great New & Undiscovered IE7 Keyboard Shortcuts

With a new version of Internet Explorer 7 come quite a few new nifty shortcuts that can make your web-surfing experience a lot more enjoyable. Some of these tips also apply to previous versions of Internet Explorer, and some to other browsers as well. Items denoted with a ‘%’ work on IE6, and those marked with a ‘*’ may work in other browsers.

1. Change Font on the Fly %,* By holding down the ctrl button using scrolling either up or down with the scroll wheel on your mouse or keyboard, you can make the font size increase or decrease as well.
2. Load From Memory %,* Have you ever wrote a post or reply or comment on a page, or filled a form, or answered a survey just to find out you clicked a link by accident and ‘lost’ your work? Hold down shift and then use the mouse/keyboard scroll wheel: you can attempt to go forward or backward in your browser history from the RAM. This isn’t like the back/front buttons at the top, those take you to the URL stored, but the scroll wheel trick will load the contents from memory, and if you’re lucky, the form hasn’t been reset.
3. Switch Between Tabs Microsoft’s solution to quick tab switching may not be as elegant as Opera’s right-click and scroll implementation, but it is more intuitive than Firefox’s ctrl+pgup or pgdown. In IE7, simply hold down ctrl and press a number. For example, if you press ctrl+1, the first tab will be activated; ctrl+4 and the 4th tab with activated, etc.
4. Close Tabs * If you want to close a tab but don’t want to use the mouse or activate the classic menu, simply click ctrl+w. One thing to note: unlike older builds of IE7, if you keep ctrl+w pressed it won’t close all but the last tab, it will instead close every tab, and then exit IE7, so be careful.
5. Show the Classic Toolbar In a bid to maximize screen real-estate and increase the aesthetics of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft has made the Menu Bar hide by default. To make it show, just press ‘alt’ once, and press it again to hide it. Just remember, you can permanently disable this feature from the Internet Explorer 7 options control panel.
6. Display “Quick Tabs” Originally know as the “Tab overview mode,” Quick Tabs shows you a preview of all the tabs you have open, and is especially handy when you have tabs with non-descriptive page titles or more tabs than you have screenspace. Just press ctrl+q and enjoy this nifty feature.
7. Favorites Center * In Internet Explorer 7, your favorites are only a button-click away. ctrl+i does the trick!
8. Feeds Sidebar One of the new features in Internet Explorer is the “Feeds Bar” which integrates straight into the Windows Feed Store which is intended to be used as an entire repo that different aggregators/content-management programs and utilities on your PC can take advantage of (such as the Windows Sidebar in Vista, and Outlook 2007, with more products on the way). To display the feeds bar, ctrl+j is your friend.
9. View History *,% Not exactly new or undiscovered, but definitely one of the most important features in Internet Explorer, and believe it or not, unused by the masses, ctrl+h will open the History Sidebar, which, in IE7, can be customized to display items the way you want it to… ctrl+h will forever remain useful! :)
10. The Final Fix So you’re still not an IE7 kind-of-guy (or gal for that matter), and though these are some really nifty tricks, they just don’t do it for you. Well, here is one trick that will be sure to make your day, and you won’t regret coming here. If you really, really can’t stand Internet Explorer 7, try this one: alt+F4 Good bye :)