Do you find yourself opening several tabs while surfing the web? It doesn’t take long before you have ten or more tabs open in one browser window. Moving from one tab to another efficiently is made easy with a few simple keyboard shortcuts.

Switching between open tabs

Use the Command key and a number key to switch directly to any particular tab.

1 = move to 1st browser tab
2 = move to 2nd browser tab
3 = move to 3rd browser tab, etc.

Mac keyboard showing how to switch tabs with Command and number keys

Using the arrow keys in Safari

While using the Safari browser, hold down Command and Shift together with either left or right arrow key will switch through your tabs. For example:

= move to the tab to the left of the current tab.
= move to the tab to the right of the current tab.

Using the arrow keys in Chrome

In Chrome the keyboard shortcut is a little bit different. Instead of using the Shift key, exchange it for the Option key:
= move to the tab to the left of the current tab.
= move to the tab to the right of the current tab.

One keyboard combo to switch all tabs

Alternatively, you can cycle through the open tabs in most browsers with the universal tab-switching keyboard shortcut Control and the Tab keys:
tab = cycle through open tabs in a browser.

Next week we’ll look at consolidating three previous lessons on tabbed browsing: moving back and forward in the browser’s history, opening new tabs, and Switching between browser tabs with some practical exercises.

 

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