Quickly Switch Tabs in Firefox with Keyboard Shortcuts

The Mozilla Firefox web browser can keep a multitude of web pages open in the same window under different tabs, and it has a handy set of keyboard shortcuts that let you quickly navigate between those tabs.

Cycle through open tabs

This first set of keyboard shortcuts for switching Firefox tabs is similar to ALT/CMD-Tab:

• Ctrl+Tab: Hold Ctrl and press the Tab key to go to the next Firefox tab.
• Ctrl+Shift+Tab: Hold Ctrl & Shift and press Tab to go to the previous Firefox tab.

With these two next/previous keyboard shortcuts, you can quickly cycle through all your open Firefox tabs.

Jump to specific tabs

This next shortcut lets you use the number keys to jump to a specific Firefox tab:

• Ctrl+[1-8]: On Windows, hold the Ctrl key and press any number key 1-8 to jump to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd … 8th tab.
• Cmd+[1-8]: On a Mac, hold the Cmd key and press a number 1 through 8 to jump to a specific tab.
• Ctrl/Cmd+9: Hold Ctrl (Windows) or Cmd (Mac) and press the 9 key to jump to the last tab.

This is one of my most-used keyboard shortcuts when reading new items in Google Reader — use the j/k Google shortcuts to browse through the recent headlines, hit “v” to open anything interesting in a new tab, then press Cmd+1 to jump back to the first tab which contains Google reader. When I have finished browsing all the new stories in Google Reader, anything that caught my interest is waiting in an open tab.