Help Desk Geek – Help Desk Tips For IT Pros

You can enhance the tab switching capability in Firefox, just by changing a configuration setting. Typically, when you press Ctrl + Tab in Firefox you move to the next open tab to the right and when you press Ctrl + Shift + Tab you move to the previous open tab to the left.

There is a configuration setting that, as long as you have more than two tabs open, displays a set of thumbnails representing the open tabs when you press Ctrl + Tab or Ctrl + Shift + Tab instead of immediately switching you to the next or previous tab.

To turn on this setting, enter the following into the address bar in Firefox:

about:config

A long list of configuration settings displays in the browser window. Scroll down to the browser:ctrlTab.previews setting. Right-click on the setting and select Toggle from the pop-up menu to set the option to true.

NOTE: You do not need to restart Firefox for the change to take effect.

Now, pressing Ctrl + Tab opens a custom tab switcher window displaying a set of small thumbnails of your open tabs. To select cycle through the thumbnails, hold down the Ctrl key and press Tab until you reach the desired tab.

As soon as you let up on the keyboard keys, the thumbnail that was last highlighted displays in the browser. You can also select a tab with your mouse while holding down the Ctrl key.

If you select the Show all X tabs button (‘X’ representing the number of tabs open) at the bottom, the switching windows displays with a custom search box and the tab switcher window will stay open (without holding down the Ctrl key) until you select a tab or enter a search term in the search box to find a particular open tab by name. You can also access this version of the custom tab switcher window by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Tab.

You can also display a button in Firefox that displays the custom tab switcher window. Currently, there is a List Tabs button on the far right of the tab bar that displays a list of open tabs in a menu format.

The List Tabs button can be changed to bring up the custom tab switcher window instead. To do this, enter about:config in the address bar in Firefox again. This time, scroll until you find the browser.allTabs.previews setting and toggle it to true, as you did for the other setting above.

Now, when you click the List Tabs button, or press Ctrl + Shift + Tab, the custom tab switcher window displays with the Search box and stays open until you select a tab or close it using the X in the upper right corner.

Note that when you access the custom tab switcher window using Ctrl + Tab, the open tabs are displayed in the order of the most recently used tabs. However, when you access the custom tab switcher window using Ctrl + Shift + Tab or by clicking the List Tabs button, the tabs are displayed in the order in which they display on the tab bar.

by Lori Kaufman