Following our article on how to increase your browsing speed in Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0 browser by using keyboard shortcuts, people that like to use the keyboard more than they like to use the mouse will definitely like to find out about a means of launching web pages with a few simple keyboard strokes.

“SiteLauncher is an add-on for Firefox that gives you a super-quick way to open your favorite websites using only your keyboard. One special hotkey brings up the 'Launcher', followed by a unique key to launch a site. SiteLauncher is especially useful as a super-fast method for opening websites you use often throughout the day,” explains David Morrison, the developer of this Firefox add-on.

The functionality of SiteLauncher is more than welcomed for one simple reason: it is not offered by any browser out there. There are other means of ensuring you fire up a web page in a swift manner: type in the URL in the address bar and the browser will go through the history of visited sites and present relevant results; assign keywords to the sites you visit the most; bookmark the web page and click it whenever you want to visit it.

Here is how SiteLauncher works: once you download it, you can access the add-on by pressing the default hotkey Ctrl + Space (this default setting can be modified); you will then see an overlay menu which displays a whole bunch of web pages and the hotkey associated to them. You can manually introduce web pages into this menu and you get to set the character associated to each site. Feel free to choose any character on the keyboard, not just letters or numbers. You can even set SiteLauncher as your default home page.

If you would like to get Site Launcher, a download location is available here.