Gamer's Control Makes Firefox Gamer Friendly
Many PC games are controlled both with the mouse and computer keyboard. Take shooters for example, the mouse is used to look around and perform actions like shooting while the keyboard is used to walk around, jump, reload or access the game menus.
Most gamers have the right hand on the mouse, and the left on the keyboard. Unless they are left-handed, of course as it is often the other way round then.
Most web browsers offer keyboard controls , like scrolling up and down, reloading a page or switching between open tabs.
Most of those controls are however located on the right side of the keyboard. The cursor keys are for instance used to scroll up or down. This means that the user needs to move the left hand to the controls to activate them.
Gamer's Control adds gamer friendly keyboard shortcuts to the Firefox web browser. The standard WASD layout is filled with shortcuts to scroll up or down, and switch to the next or previous tab in the browser. R reloads the page, q and e go back and forth in page history, and c closes the current tab.
Those controls are obviously inactive when forms and text input fields are active; writing this article would be hell otherwise.
Full control list
w: scroll up
s: scroll down
a: previous tab
d: next tab
shift+w: scroll to top
shift+s: scroll to bottom
space: page down
shift+space: page up
q: history back
e: history forward
r: reload
x: stop loading
f: new tab
c: close tab
shift+c: undo close tab
The developer has promised to add key customizations in one of the next updates. It would be interesting if keys could be switched or disabled, in case they are not needed at all.
Gamer's Control is an add-on for the Firefox web browser. It is compatible with all Firefox versions from 2 to 3, and it is likely that compatibility can be forced in Firefox 4.
Update: The extension is still compatible with all recent versions of the Firefox web browser but it has not been updated since 2010 which means that it may behave erratic in some regards.
Brings a whole new meaning to c-c-c-c-c-combo breaker.