Aaron Johnson Now with 50% less caffeine!

Tabbing Through Tabs

My boss asked me today if it was possible to tab through the tabs of a Firefox window (the only drawback to tabbed browsing is that you lose ALT-TAB). Turns out you can use CTRL-PAGEDOWN and CTRL-PAGEUP to tab through multiple tabs in a Firefox window, Which is nice. Some of the other ones I use without even realizing they’ve become part of my vocabulary are:

CTRL-T — open a new tab
CTRL-D — bring focus to the URL
CTRL-R — reload the current page
CTRL-F12 — bring focus to the google toolbar search box

There’s a nice list of keyboard shortcuts here.

I think you should have to memorize at least 12 keyboard shortcuts before you’re even allowed to use a computer. It kills me when someone uses a mouse to do something you can do in less than a second with the keyboard. Maybe someone can write a Pragmatic Keyboarding book or a Keyboarding Hacks books.

CTRL-PGDOWN works, but I usually use CTRL-TAB and CTRL-SHIFT-TAB to scroll through open tabs.

I use CTRL-K (instead of F-12) to set the focus to the toolbar search box. To scroll through the list of available search engines use CTRL-UP and CTRL-DOWN when focused there.

Just one difference from your shortcuts, CTRL-D gives me the “Add Bookmark” pop-up window. Instead, I use CTRL-L to bring focus to the address bar.

You can also use the scroll wheel of an explorer mouse over the tab area. It’s fast, but a little hard to control.

Alt-D also puts you in the address bar, and is compatible with Internet Explorer too (although Ctrl-L is compatible with Safari).

I blogged some obscure (and not-so-obscure) keyboard tips here: http://blog.joecheng.com/archives/000031.html

Hmmm…wonder why there are so many shortcuts to get to the address bar, I use F6

Was passing through on other business and noticed this. You can get approximate alt-tab switching behavior with the use of the lasttab extension.
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&version=1.0%20&os=Windows&category=Tabbed%20Browsing&numpg=10&id=112
Works pretty slick. It’s not EXACTLY the same as alt-tab, but it at least gets the first couple switches right. Where it picks up after your “last” tab is where it differs.

“the only drawback to tabbed browsing is that you lose ALT-TAB”

This is incorrect. ALT-TAB is for switching windows. When you have multiple tabs open, you are still in one window. If you had two Firefox windows open (or any other app), each with multiple tabs, ALT-TAB would work as it should.