How in the Tech

Keyboard Shortcut to Switch Tabs in Firefox and IE

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 18, 2008 ⋅ Tags: firefox tips, internet explorer tips

By now, most everyone has made the migration to a browser that supports tabbed browsing - whether Firefox or Internet Explorer 7. (Yes, I’m aware of Opera and Safari but for the sake of this tip lets pretend they don’t have any market share … er pretend?) Tabbed browsing is basically the opening of webpages in tabs across your single browser window, rather than individual windows across your taskbar in Windows. What seems like such a minor feature quickly turns into a requirement for any serious Internet user. But what if you are a power user who is used to having multiple browser sesions going, ALT+TABing to quickly switch your focus. ALT+TAB still switches active windows, but it does nothing in the tab-based browsing paradigm.

If you are like me and are too lazy to reach for that mouse, I’ve got the simple fix. Actually, it’s not fix at all - it’s already built into Firefox and IE7. Use the keyboad shortcut CTRL+TAB to cycle between each loaded tab in a single browser session. I admit that this isn’t such a huge tip, but the keyboard shortcut isn’t made very apparent in either browser!

Good luck in retraining your ALT+TAB reflexes to the new CTRL+TAB method.

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