Some teenagers can type as fast as 40-50 words per minute on their small smartphone screens using only their thumbs. But not everyone can move their thumbs as fast as that. Fortunately, for the rest of us there are much faster alternatives, for example, the QR codes. QR codes have really made life easy for the people who are not really very good with typing on their mobile phones. Now you can scan the QR codes and the very long web address that would have made your fingers bleed otherwise is instantly inside your phone.
Usually you have to install a QR code scanner app in Android before you can scan a URL and then open it in the default web browser. But if you are a Firefox user, then you can scan the QR codes from inside the Firefox web browser’s address bar itself. Here is how you can enable and use this feature:
- First of all make sure that you are using the latest version of the Firefox web browser in Android. If you are not sure, then just visit getfirefox.com in the Firefox browser and it will tell you whether you are using the latest version or not.
- Now go ahead, search ZXing Barcode Scanner in the Google Play store and install it.
- Go back to Firefox, close all the open Firefox instances (by tapping on the back button several times) and then relaunch it. This time you will find a QR code icon in the address bar of Firefox browser. You can tap on this small QR code icon to start scanning a QR code.
- When the QR code scanning is complete, the scanned URL goes back into the Firefox address bar automatically.
The same feature can also work with other QR code scanners, but the ZXing barcode scanner works very well with Firefox and is able to scan many types of bar codes.