Chrome Browser Deal-Breaker: Ctrl+Tab behavior

Depending on who you ask, Google Chrome is the world’s most popular browser here in mid-2012.  It’s fast, lightweight, and standards-compliant.  However, Chrome has one major (for me) issue that will prevent me from ever using it as my primary browser: The lack of any way to modify the behavior of the Ctrl+Tab keyboard shortcut to switch between tabs.

Like the other leading desktop web browsers Firefox and Internet Explorer, the default behavior of the Ctrl+Tab keyboard shortcut in Chrome is to switch between tabs in left-to-right order.  I’ve believed for years that this behavior is inefficient at best, and the default switch order for Ctrl+Tab should be most-recently-used (MRU) order. The default left-to-right Ctrl+Tab switch order makes it impossible to quickly use the keyboard to toggle back and forth between two tabs when there are multiple tabs open.  Left-to-right order is also inconsistent with the long-established MRU order for the keyboard shortcut for switching between open applications (Alt+Tab in Windows and many Linux distributions; Command+Tab in OSX).

Unlike Firefox and Internet Explorer, however, Chrome offers no way to change the default Ctrl+Tab behavior, even via add-ons / extensions.  To compare the three leading desktop browsers:

• Firefox: Has an excellent addon called LastTab which has a great implementation of MRU Ctrl+Tab behavior (including an Alt+Tab-like preview window of the tabs arranged in MRU order);
• Internet Explorer: Has a “Use most recent order when switching tabs with Ctrl+Tab” checkbox in its Advanced Options settings;
• Chrome: There’s no configuration setting to change the Ctrl+Tab behavior.  The Ctrl+Tab key combination apparently is defined as “reserved,” so extensions can’t change its behavior either.

There’s a long-standing (2008) Chromium bug, Issue 5569, logged for Chrome’s Ctrl+Tab behavior; however, it was marked as “WontFix” shortly after it was opened.  Google does acknowledge the demand for MRU switching behavior in a brief statement on the Chromium project’s User Experience > Tabs page:

Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+Shift+Tab, Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn can all be used to switch back and forth between tabs. While there is great demand for an MRU-ordered switcher, we've so far been unable to find an MRU switcher that makes sense beyond the first three most recent tabs, or one that works well with background-created tabs.

I’m somewhat bemused by this statement; there are many good reference implementations of MRU switching order available.  One specific example is the LastTab Firefox extension mentioned above; I’ve used that for years and have been very happy with it.

If you’d like to add your vote to this issue, feel free to head over to Chromium Issue 5569 and “star” the issue and/or leave a comment.

This issue is a deal-breaker for me to consider adopting Chrome as my primary desktop web browser – Chrome’s benefits don’t outweigh the potential several-times-per-day productivity hit of not being able to rapidly and easily toggle between two specific browser tabs.  In the meantime, I’m happy to continue using Firefox as my own primary browser. 

In occasional situations where I do need to use Chrome and have multiple web pages open, going old school and opening each web page in its own browser window (instead of using multiple tabs) is a tolerable workaround (since that lets me use the operating system’s MRU window switching behavior to rapidly toggle back and forth between two windows as needed).

IE7: Microsoft's Ctrl+Tab behavior rationale

Earlier today, Aaron Sauve from Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 team made an interesting post to the IE Blog covering the IE team's rationale for the various default behaviors in IE7 with respect to multiple tabs.

As of the latest IE7 beta (beta 3), the default behavior when using the Ctrl+Tab keystroke to switch to the next tab (or Ctrl+Shift+Tab to switch to the previous) tab is to define the "next tab" as the tab to the right of the current tab as the tabs are displayed along the top of the IE7 window.

An alternative behavior, available via a checkbox in the Advanced tab of IE7's Internet Options dialog, is to have the Ctrl+Tab switch to the most-recently-used tab instead of the "next" tab. This is how the Alt+Tab application-switch keystroke works in Windows: pressing Alt+Tab once switches you to the application you were using most recently (not the application to the right of the current application's button in the Taskbar).

As I've blogged previously, I feel pretty strongly that the "most recent" tab switching order should be the default behavior for Ctrl+Tab. It's more powerful than the "left to right" behavior, as it can be used to quickly toggle back and forth between any two open tabs.

The reasons that Aaron gives for the "left to right" order being the IE7 default are:

• We value predictability over the more focused compare scenario.
• We want to be consistent with other apps that use tabs throughout the system.

Regarding the predictability issue: Let's go ahead and assume for the moment that the "left to right" behavior is in fact more predictable. However, I would expect that the Ctrl+Tab keystroke would be used most frequently by more experienced users. Less experienced users would probably be most likely to activate a tab by clicking the desired tab with the mouse. Given that keystrokes such as Ctrl+Tab will most often be used by "power users," I would argue that the fact that the "most recent" switching order behavior taking a bit more time to "get the hang of" is a lesser concern.

Regarding the issue of being consistent with the behavior of other applications, I went ahead and briefly tested a few other Microsoft apps that I have on my system. Of the applications I tested, Microsoft Excel was the only application that has a "left to right"-like behavior on a Ctrl+Tab press, in this case to switch between open workbooks. (And even this example is questionable, as Excel displays open workbooks in multiple Taskbar buttons, not in multiple tabs.)

On the other hand, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 provides an excellent implementation of "most recent" order switching on a Ctrl+Tab press, switching between open windows which are displayed in tabs near the top of the window. Visual Studio even provides an "Alt+Tab"-like window that appears while the operation is in progress showing all of the available open windows that can be switched to.

As I noted in my previous post, the most prominent app that I use currently that by default provides "left-to-right" Ctrl+Tab switching order is actually Firefox! Having a better Ctrl+Tab order by default could be nice differentiator for Microsoft.

Given that "most recent" Ctrl+Tab switching order provides more powerful behavior, and that it will be primarily "power users" using the Ctrl+Tab keystroke, I would encourage Microsoft to reexamine the decision of whether to have the "most recent" behavior checkbox under IE7's advanced options be enabled by default.

Ctrl+Tab and IE 7

While I was on hold with Microsoft support recently, I decided to download and try the new public beta release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on my test machine.

Overall, it feels a lot like a Firefox clone -- which isn't a bad thing. Firefox 1.5 has recently become my primary browser of choice for all pages and applications except for those which only play nice with IE. Prior to switching, I had used IE 6 for everything. (I had briefly tried Opera 8, but I ended up dropping it because it locks up my work machine for about 10-15 seconds while it is first starting up, and it doesn't support some keyboard shortcuts supported by IE that I tend to use automatically such as Ctrl+Enter to prepend "www." and append ".com" in the address bar -- Alt+d, "google", Ctrl+Enter takes me to the http://www.google.com site.)

One thing that I don't like about Firefox 1.5, however, is the behavior of Ctrl+Tab. When there are 3 or more tabs open, then repeated presses of Ctrl+Tab activate through each tab in order. Unfortunately, the IE 7 team has dutifully cloned this behavior in the current beta version of IE 7.

The behavior I would want to see is having Ctrl+Tab work like Alt+Tab does in Windows -- a press of Alt+Tab activates the most-recently-used window, not just the "next" window. This makes it very convenient to rapidly switch back and forth between 2 windows that I'm using at any given time.

There is a good Firefox extension available to fix the Ctrl+Tab behavior, LastTab. I'm willing to install LastTab on each of my machines since (1) FireFox makes it so painless to install extensions, and (2) I'm aware that any machines other than my own are not likely to have Firefox installed so I'll just be using IE on those machines anyway.

However, as soon as IE 7 is released, it is likely to become the new corporate standard at most businesses. For this reason, I would like to see the IE 7 team get the Ctrl+Tab behavior "right" by default, so that when I'm using someone else's machine I can Ctrl+Tab between tabs without being annoyed by the behavior, regardless of whether it might be easy to fix the behavior on my own machine by using an extension.