Firefox Tab Navigation via Keyboard

While I’m sure everyone else in the world knows this, apparently in Firefox (at least version 1.5, under Windows XP), you can switch between tabs with your arrow keys. Holy Robin Hood, Batman!

You see, I’ve been trying to decide if I could do without the LastTab extension since I installed version 1.5 and it was automatically deactivated, and as of now, the answer is “yes!”, because I stumbled on this feature by accident (and I haven’t seen it documented anywhere).

So, to use your arrow keys to switch between tabs, just click a tab to select it (if it’s not already selected), then click it again. It also appears that you can just double-click. Whichever action you choose, you will display the tab, then “select’ the tab. You’ll be able to tell by a little box around the tab title.

Once you’ve selected a tab title, just use your arrow keys to navigate. To move left, press left or up. To move right, use right or down. You can also use home to go to the first tab and end to go to the last.

If you hold down the control key while pressing one of these keys, you will “scan” to that tab, but it won’t display it’s contents. The display is pretty fast on my PC, so I’m not sure why you’d want to do this, but it works!

For those of you wondering why you cannot just use control-tab, you certainly can. But it only goes in one direction. You can even control-shift-tab to reverse, but I don’t find the keystrokes as easy to use when jumping back and forth.

Now I just wish there was an easy “select tab title” command. I know you can use control-# (1-9) to select tabs 1-9, respectively. But unless I’m on the first tab or two, that doesn’t help much, as I have to figure out which tab I am on. And if I have more than 9 tabs, it doesn’t work at all! In any case, that select doesn’t select the tab title, so you can’t use it for navigation.

Right now, if I want to jump to another tab, I have to use the mouse to select it (or to select the title). It would be cool if I could use some keyboard shortcut to select the current tab’s title, and then just use the arrow keys to move among them until I find what I want, then reverse it when I want to come back.

Anyone feel like whipping up an extension to do this? I don’t think I’ll have time to do it in the immediate future.

Firefox also has loads of other keyboard shortcuts, including such sweet ones as find previous (shift-f3), opening addresses in new tabs (alt-enter) and automatic domain completion (for .com, .net and .org). You may want to review the list every once in a while to see what else you can do without using the mouse!