Firefox tab shifting like in Opera

Question

In Opera there is a nice feature that keeps me hooked:

Shift+Tab will move to the last opened tab. Pressing Shift+Tab then subsequent tabs (Shift+Tab then Tab again) breaks out of the last used tab and cycles the tabs just like Firefox or Chrome.

Invaluable as a developer when I have many tabs open and frequently just shift between two of them. Much the same functionality as seen in PhpStorm.

How to do this in Firefox?

phuclv · Answer 1 · 2024-06-19T13:32:39.700

Don't know where you get that weird tab switching behavior with Shift+Tab from, but by default Opera uses

Ctrl+Tab to cycle between recently used tabs. Press Shift to reverse the direction
Ctrl+Page Up/Down to move to the previous/next tab. This aligns with all browsers and most tabbed applications
Tab to move to the next object in the page. That means Shift+Tab moves focus to the previous object in the page. All application forms behave this way, not only browsers

That's exactly the same as Firefox when enabling "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" in the Settings menu. It's a new feature in Firefox v50 since 2016. Just enable it and use Ctrl+Tab/Ctrl+Page Up/Down. Now you have the ability to both switch between recently used tabs and switch to the next/previous tab without clashing with the focus moving shortcut

See

Here's the default Opera settings if you're curious

There's even an option for highlighting links and elements while pressing Tab instead of just moving the focus

Probably you're using some weird extension or having some external app stealing shortcut, because I tried changing Ctrl+PageUp to Shift+Tab in Opera but failed. That's obvious because as soon as one presses Tab the focus will move away and the shortcut text box can't receive the key combination anymore. But anyway using Shift+Tab is a bad idea. How would you move to the next text box after filling a field in a form? Using a mouse defeats the purpose of shortcuts and you don't even need Ctrl+Tab in that case

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 09 '24 at 14:02

On a Mac, at least, it is in the System Preferences, not the browser preferences, so it makes pressing tab a system-wide standard. Not sure about Windows. And the dumb Mac preference changed all by itself during my system upgrade to Mojave. But c'est la vie.

On a Mac, go to System Preferences → Keyboard → Shortcuts. On the bottom, choose either "Text boxes and lists only" or "All controls." The former (my preference) lets you jump from text box to text box; the latter (which I despise) lets you jump from text box to link to link to link to text box. I was going NUTS trying to figure out how to change this in Firefox, because both the Firefox preference and the about:config preference accessibility.tabfocus are both no longer there.

So, if you cannot find the system preference, or even if you just plain want to override your system preference, here is how you can tell Firefox directly, exactly what you want...

Type about:config in the address bar and hit enter. Ignore all warnings, etc., etc.
Type accessibility.tabfocus in the search bar. You will see one other preference there that is a Boolean, which you can ignore.
Make sure the radio button choice that you use is "Integer." Press the + button to add the preference yourself.
If you type in "1," pressing tab jumps you from form field to form field; if you type in "4," pressing tab jumps you from link to link to anything (as they say, "all controls," meaning link or field, or button, or anything).

That's it. But here's the REALLY weird thing (at least to me). Why isn't it just a Boolean? And you can type in literally any integer and get different one of those two tab focus choices, seemingly at random. SO strange!

1 fields
(-1) controls
3 fields
4 controls
(-4) controls
7 controls
(-7) fields
123456789 controls
1234567890 fields

In any case, hope this helps. If you like it, please vote for it!

Firefox tab shifting like in Opera

2 Answers2