The Option Key currently comes in two forms: Orange or Silver, depending on if you are on the original Pre or any other webOS device. Regardless of the color, that single keyboard key is quite versatile, allowing you to do quite a number of different thing throughout the operating system. In this week’s Tip Roundup, we explore some of the many uses you will find for this Option Key. Keep reading after the break to reexamine all those uses
Have you ever been browsing the web on your device and come across a big gray area that you can’t get past on the page? You probably tried refeshing the page, closing and reloading the web browser, or going back and then forward, but you just can’t seem to get to the rest of the page. Luckily, there is a really easy fix for this that works almost every time. If you rotate the phone to landscape mode, that will almost always give you access to the rest of the page that was blocked by that gray space. Then, just rotate the phone back to portrait mode to continue reading. Continue reading after the break for screenshots
Have you ever been browsing the web on your device and come across a big gray area that you can’t get past on the page? You probably tried refeshing the page, closing and reloading the web browser, or going back and then forward, but you just can’t seem to get to the rest of the page. Luckily, there is a really easy fix for this that works almost every time. If you rotate the phone to landscape mode, that will almost always give you access to the rest of the page that was blocked by that gray space. Then, just rotate the phone back to portrait mode to continue reading. Continue reading after the break for screenshots
While you can perform a quick search of Google or Wikipedia directly from Universal Search, the web browser has a mini-version of Universal Search built in that allows for a similar action. From anywhere on a website within the browser card, you can just start typing on the keyboard to bring up a search bar on the top of the screen. There are 4 search options that you can take advantage of once you start typing:
If you enter in an actual web address URL and press either the Enter key (
) or the Arrow icon (
) on the screen, the browser will load up that website.) or you can tap on the top row labeled "Google" to initiate a Google Search.
Did you know that you can press the Option (Orange/Silver) key and then click on links or pictures in the browser to bring up a pop-up menu with some options on how to interact with those areas? The options are different 
depending on which one you click on Option + tapping a link will bring up the following options:
Option + tapping a picture will bring up the following options:
Many websites (including the full PreCentral.net website) are not built with a mobile browser in mind, often using dropdown menus that are only accessible by rolling your mouse cursor over a certain area of the screen. Since the mobile web browser doesn’t have a mouse, you need another way to access these menus. Luckily, the browser does allow for a press-and-hold method to bring down these menus. Unfortunately, when you lift your finger from the screen after the dropdown menu appears, the browser then registers that as a tap and loads up any link that was tied to that dropdown menu (for example, the "articles" link in the attached screenshot). There are 2 simple ways to combat this behavior:
Thanks to emusician in the forums for this tip
We haven’t often lamented the built-in web browser on our webOS phones, but in all truthfulness it is lacking in some areas and hasn’t evolved all that much since the initial release of webOS. With the appearance of default web browser selection (continually grayed out) in webOS, it became clear that Palm intends to open up the market to additional browsers. What we’re seeing now is among the first for webOS, and it’s called PreFox.
As the name would imply, it’s Firefox for your Pre. Specifically, it’s a port of Mozilla’s mobile-bound Fennec browser to webOS. Shoehorning it into the appropriate packing was a five month ordeal for developer Dave Townsend of Fractal Brew, and there’s still plenty of work to be done to make it fully useable. The developer notes that testing has only been done on Sprint Pre, and that it wasn’t until more recent releases of webOS (specifically the versions that support C and C++ coding) that it was even possible to make it work at all. There are still some bugs (notably the Too Many Cards error) to work out, but it does work.
Townsend notes that work on PreFox is slowing at this point due to the nature of finding and identifying bugs. To that end, a request for additional beta testers has been put out, with instructions for installation and bug reporting available at the PreFox website. PreFox is, of course, in rough beta form, so while it is functional, it’s not yet to the point of serving as a full replacement browser for your webOS device (it is very very slow and sometimes crash-prone). That said, it’s still plenty promising with tabs, rudimentary extension support, and more; we can’t help but be interested.
Source: Fractal Brew; Via: Alice Carback on Twitter
Web browsing on a webOS device is usually a great experience, but one complaint we often hear is about the lack of keyboard shortcuts for things such as paging up and down. While there are no built-in keyboard shortcuts for the browser, webOS did add the ability to use the gesture area to scroll up and down a full page, but only while in landscape mode. So, to take advantage of this feature, make sure you are browsing in landscape mode and then just perform a Forward Swipe to scroll down one page or a Back Swipe to scroll up one page. Note that if you have Advanced Gestures enabled, the Full Swipe will still perform a quick switch between your open cards without first going into card view.
Pinch-to-zoom is a good way to zoom in and out throughout webOS, but you can also perform a double-tap to quickly zoom in on large blocks of text within an email, website or document. Simply double-tap on the text you want to read and you will find that the device automatically zooms in so that text fits the screen width. If you want to quickly zoom out, just double-tap again. You can also double-tap on a Photo to zoom in to a specific spot.
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Universal search is an extremely powerful tool within webOS that allows you to access all kinds of data on your phone within a matter of seconds and from anywhere on your device. To access Universal Search, all you need to do is start typing on the keyboard while in the Launcher or while in Card View (to access card view while in an App, simply swipe up from the gesture area to minimize that app). In addition to Contacts and Applications searches, webOS can also do a variety of extended searches in the web or maps. Continue reading after the break to learn the specifics of these extended searches