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Comment by doliveira | Hacker News Reader

Firefox is worth it if only for the Ctrl-Tab going in recently used order. I hate using Chrome and needing to use the mouse to actually find a tab

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Huh, you’re the first person I’ve encountered liking that behaviour. Since Firefox switched to MRU Ctrl+Tab by default, every Firefox user I know (whether a long-time user, one migrating from another browser, or someone for whom it is their first browser by virtue of their youth, and I have at least one in each category) has successfully found and toggled that option.

I must admit, however, that I do have Tab Flip for Tree Style Tab, with Shift+F2 to switch between the current and most recently selected tabs (like Ctrl+6 in Vim to toggle between the most recent buffers), and have added similar elsewhere, with Meta+F2 to switch between most recent workspaces in the Sway or i3 window managers:

  bindsym Mod4+F2 workspace back_and_forth
  bindsym Mod4+Shift+F2 move container to workspace back_and_forth, workspace back_and_forth

I wouldn’t want to be without at least this single-level MRU in my browser or window manager. (On more traditional window managers, you normally have Alt+Tab or ⌘⇥ and ⌘` which are all some form of more extensive MRU list, though I find macOS’s application-level treatment bizarre and extraordinarily frustrating because of how cripplingly limiting it is if you work with multiple multi-window apps and want to see a window of each. And yeah, it’s easy to see when reflecting on Alt+Tab why Firefox went the way they did with Ctrl+Tab, making it behave similarly. But I haven’t previously found anyone actually liking it.)

Before most-recent-order was the default I turned it on manually, so it's most certainly not every user.

I shall be the second you've met.

Its likely more useful for those who tend towards many tabs open at once

Right now, I have 258 tabs open in my main window, of which I’m actively using at least a dozen, and will use another few dozen within a day or so. (Probably should go through and clean out a hundred or two.) Most of my family is some degree of tab hoarder as well (my eldest sister regularly has over a thousand tabs spread across a few windows).

Get the "tab stash" extension, you can stash your tabs instead of nuking them. That way you can go back a few months and find things that would be tougher to find through history or other means.

Yet another tab management (YATM) recommendation here. I use the OneTab extension to help me manage tabs. In a recent update, they added the ability to:

A) name tab groups;

B) lock specific groups which mimics the capability of bookmark folders (clicking a link doesn’t remove it from the group).

The extension has helped me reduce the number of open windows on my laptop, among other productivity improvements.

I used to do this too, then I got a bookmark save service (Pocket). Now whenever I see something that I have the reaction of keeping the tab around, I just save it and close it instead. Makes browsing lighter. I do still have around 20 tabs open normally, mostly things that don't fit in the "bookmark save" workflow, but definitely better than the 100+ tabs it used to be before.

Huh, this is the first time I heard that FF supports MRU, and it's amazing (well except that it's only current window, see below)! I don't know why it was turned off by default.

MRU should always be the default, this is also what IDE's do, and alt+tab does with main windows.

What is even the point of ctrl+tab cycling to next tab? You got to press it dozens of times to go back to the original tab... Why would anyone use that? You can use ctrl+pgdn and pgup to go to next/previous which is more sensible for this.

So disappointingly, now I turned this feature on in FF, and I'm disappointed to see that it only cycles through most recent tab of current window. I wish it would go through any window. I have always dozens of windows with dozens of tabs each, and I find myself sometimes just opening the same URL again due to not bothering trying to find back a tab I was in just a few minutes ago due to not having a ctrl+tab that goes to most recent tab in any window.

alt+tab is a very different operation.

ctrl+tab cycling to the next tab is essential for many ways of surfing the web.

For instance, research a topic and tap up many tabs. Now go through them one by one. And in the process of doing so you might want to tab up even more.

At this point cycling to the next tab becomes a way to navigate the history, but where you have the context of each step preserved. MRU in this context is a nightmare.

MRU for tabs doesn't make any sense to me, that purpose is served by switching to another window instead (which is, and should be, MRU).

But ctrl+pgdn already goes to next tab, so ctrl+tab doesn't need to do that same thing, MRU is what multi-document programs (like text editors with multiple open files, IDE's) usually do for ctrl+tab. And this for good reason: this allows to cycle through the most recent documents the easiest, following usage patterns. This usage pattern also applies to browsers (and as said, ctrl+pgup/pgdn already do prev/next tab for the other usage pattern)

finding back your tab amongst the many open ones is a nightmare without some form of easily accessed recently used list that also works across windows

ctrl+pgdn is a two-handed operation, doa. The use-case for a browser and IDEs etc. is vastly different.

>finding back your tab amongst the many open ones is a nightmare without some form of easily accessed recently used list that also works across windows

not at all, they are ordered and you already know the direction you want to go. Unlike MRU that breaks down completely after a few tabs.

They're not ordered for me, any tab could be anywhere and many tabs can exist for many contexts from different moments of time that can be relevant again at any future time. How do you get the magical ability to have the tabs in the exact order you need them and have to go in only one direction?

Because that's how you open them. Which is the relevant context you need.

As soon as you have to search for anything the MRU is poisoned beyond sense and you have to start all over again.

> Because that's how you open them. Which is the relevant context you need.

Opening multiple tabs from one place, and then going through them exactly in that order, is just not something that happens often for me.

> As soon as you have to search for anything the MRU is poisoned beyond sense and you have to start all over again.

Not at all. Imagine you were reading some document in some tab. This tab could be in any window, on any workspace.

Now you check your email in-between, which is another tab in another window.

Now after checking your email, you want to go back to the document you were reading: try finding it back amongst all windows across all desktops, possibly not anymore the front tab because you also just opened a link from the document, or instinctively opened the discord tab of the window the document was in or paused some youtube music that was playing, or whatever!

MRU solves that perfectly. We're talking about 100s of tabs across multiple windows here. With MRU you only have to go through maybe max 10 or so, which is easy to find the document back in.

Funny enough, for me it's extremely uncomfortable when tab cycling doesn't represent the tab order I see on screen. I've always disable that feature and even have code to autodisable it on new installs

You can achieve ordered cycling with Ctrl+PgUp/Down in most software, like Firefox. I use a mix of that and Tab to navigate through my tabs

The benefit of MRU order is that you can use it blindly to go to the last-nth tab without having to eye-coordinate with the contents of the tab bar. It becomes an automatic muscle-memory thing.

how many tabs do you have open on average?

Usually less than a dozen, though I don’t quite see the relevance. I use MRU to switch between two to four (rarely more) related tabs.

In code editors I often have several dozens of tabs open, and MRU is a crucial usability feature when coding, so I’d say that its usefulness is independent of the number of open tabs.

With MRU order the stack order becomes automatically grouped by subject, like actual function stacks.

I really had to go and disable that. I use a lot of tabs, I switch between them often, and a few of them stay open for a while

I have tree style tabs so my tabs are all already ordered in a vaguely meaningful way, but the recent use order of my last tabs is completely unpredictable to me!

With this feature on ^tab might as well be random for how badly it confuses me.. I'm so glad Mozilla hadn't removed the opt-out yet.

I think Sidebery is better for tab management. The default tab UI is horrible for any non-trivial work.

As another big fan of MRU tab switching, there is an extension for Chromium based browsers that enables this feature: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-tabs/jnjfein...

It’s mystifying why any browser would choose not to have that feature. It’s basic ergonomics of tabbing UIs.

Firefox is literally the only program of any kind that I can think of that even supports MRU Ctrl+Tab. Windowed UIs, sure, MRU is conventional, but tabbed?

All IDEs and editors I use support MRU order.

IE also had/has MRU tabs.

Windows itself?

Chrome uses an alternative tab workflow brought up by alt/cmd+shift+a which will bring up a list of tabs in last used order. You can then navigate via keyboard or just type to search tabs.

That doesn't explain why the other method isn't at least an option in Chrome but I figured it was worth mentioning for those that missed the functionality.

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