any logic to fill the gaps? You know the type. One minute you're eating breakfast, the next minute you're a flying coconut, the next minute you're breakfast and the flying coconut is eating you. Sometimes surfing the Web feels the same way. One minute you're reading ESPN, and the next minute you're shopping for pants. The Internet is a random patchwork of information loosely joined by hyperlinks. If you're not careful, it's easy to get lost. But Firefox is there for you. Its powerful yet simple history controls track your every move and allow you to swiftly return to any spot in your journey. You decide how much history Firefox remembers and when to empty out the history. In real life, you have two kinds of memory: short-term and long-term. (Or perhaps you don't - where are those keys?) Firefox's memory works the same way. Your short-term history on the Web consists of the last ten Web sites you visited in the current browsing session, and your long-term history consists of all the sites you visited in the past nine days - or however many days you choose. And, yes, those jeans look great on you - now get back to the sports page!           Navigating Short-Term History If you've used the Web for any amount of time, you're already intimately familiar with navigating short-term history in Firefox. You know how to go back to the page you looked at previously (click the Back button), and you know how to go forward again (click the Forward button). Through deductive reasoning, you've probably also figured out how to go back and forward more than one page: Just click each respective button repeatedly until you get to the page you want. Tip If you prefer the keyboard, you can press Alt+< and Alt+> in Windows (or +[ and +] on a Mac) to go backwards and forwards, respectively. But Firefox exists to rid your life of every last extraneous click, especially with something as common as going back and forth. Seconds here and there quickly add up to hours every month. Firefox thus offers two additional ways to jump immediately back to a page you visited recently. I explain each way in the following sections. Going back and forth with the Back and Forward menus The first method of navigating short-term history is to use the menus attached to the Back and Forward buttons: 1. Right-click the Back or Forward button, depending on the direction in which you want to navigate. Rather than right-clicking, you can instead click the arrows next to the Back and Forward buttons. The button must be lit up (not grayed out) for you to use it. Figure 6-1 illustrates the difference between a lit up button and a grayed out button. After clicking, a menu appears, and it contains up to the last ten Web sites you visited in the current browser window (see Figure 6-2). Note, however, that after you go back ten pages, you can then go back another ten. In other words, the menu displays only the last ten Web sites at a time so it's not overwhelming, but Firefox stores dozens of pages in your short-term history. Figure 6-1: The Back button is lit up, but the Forward button is grayed out.