This very closely mirrors my experience. I bought an MMO mouse to use in Photoshop but found that it was probably even more useful after mapping forward, back, switch/kill/resurrect tab and so on. I also configured normal click to “always open in the same tab/window” and open in new tabs exclusively with middle click. The efficiency increases are impressive.

Gwern’s tips for “quick searching” (which I implement using DDG !bangs and Firefox Saved Searches) are very useful too, when you know you’ll use a website regularly, I have about 30 custom saved searches now.

Back when it still worked for most of the web (and before it became the progenitor of most contemporary browsers) KDE's Konqueror was my favourite and default browser.

It came with a bunch of built-in web search keywords that sped up your search intents (all customisable of course). Usually two or three letter prefixes, that were terminated by a colon, so you could, f.e. 'ggl: khtml history' (takes you direct to first google 'lucky' result) or 'wp: charles eaton' (search and show wikipedia's top hit for charles eaton), etc.

Another option for people who don't have additional mouse buttons is to install addons for mouse gestures, such as Gesturefy [1]. You can then bind undo close tab, next/prev tab, and others to a mouse gesture, allowing you to do those actions without button hunting on the screen.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gesturefy/

> If you have a mouse with some additional side buttons (that you don't already have mapped) I can strongly recommend mapping them to ctrl-pgup and ctrl-pgdn, so you can go left/right with your tabs in the current browser without having to relocate either your hands or your mouse pointer.

These hotkeys are functionally the same as Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab, which - at least in my idle position - don't require moving your hands any meaningful amount.

Totally agree - if your hands are on the keyboard, then use the keyboard shortcuts, no movement required.

If your hand is on your mouse, though, this means you don't have to move that hand back. (I'm assuming left-hand mouse uses won't find anything involving TAB to be hand-agnostic. : )

My usage pattern tends to be keyboard - search, tune search - then mouse - open lots of new tabs, then scroll up / down with mouse, and flick between those new tabs with the mouse, perhaps select some text with the mouse.

I think everyone agrees that frequent relocation between mouse / keyboard is sub-optimal.