If you want to quickly navigate the web using only your keyboard, Gleebox can be helpful. It takes a keyboard centric approach to browsing, allowing you to perform the common mouse actions using your keyboard.
Gleebox is available for Firefox as a Grease monkey script and for Google chrome as an extension. Once the installation is over you can start using it by pressing the Gkey which brings Gleebox into focus. Following is the list of shortcut keys to work with:
- Tab: moves to the next selected element.
- Shift + Tab: moves to the previous selected element.
- Enter: launch a link or execute a command.
- Shift + Enter: opens a link in a new tab (only in Firefox at the moment. In Chrome, it depends upon the ‘target’ attribute of link)
- Esc: quit using Gleebox if it is focused. If the Gleebox button isn’t highlighted, simply press Gto quit.
More advanced commands can be found from the user manual page.
The interesting thing about Gleebox is that when you enter any text in a page, it searches for links on the current page that matches with the text. If it finds any links, the link is highlighted and to open it, just press the return key.
In case there is no link matching with the text you have entered, Gleebox goes further and performs a search on Google. Watch the following screen cast to have an idea how Gleebox works:
Techie-Buzz Verdict
Gleebox works great but it may conflict with sites which have their own keyboard shortcuts defined (e.g Gmail, Google reader etc).
Techie-Buzz rating: 3/5 (average)
