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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

MRU Tab Switching out of the box. Didn't expect that now that some shitty browsers (Chrome) can't even have it via extensions. I will never understand why someone intentionally removed ctrl+tab functionality from their browser (it's completely useless feature as "select tab to the right").

So I'll keep an eye on this for sure. Even though there are lots of missing features and couple of bugs that I noticed right out of the box. I hope they'll get to the point where they can maintain their own version of Blink, to get rid of some stupid choices they made (text selection for example).

Relevant (open-source) project: http://otter-browser.org/

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This is the first feature I immediately felt compelled to change. Tabs are visually represented with a spacial order, and there is nothing to indicate order of access. If I can see the tab I want is two to the left, and I can't remember how many "tabs ago" I viewed it, pressing CTRL+shift+TAB twice is thoughtlessly easy and conceptually simple.

Why not CTRL+PGUP / CTRL+PGDN ? Requires less fingers too.

EDIT: Sadly Vivaldi doesn't seem to support CTRL+PGUP / CTRL+PGDN yet.

You can remap this functionality, but this particular key combo doesn't seem to work.

By default it was on ctrl+3/4, and I don't think it's a wise choice as ctrl+number is good for either selecting first 10 tabs (chrome, ff), or for opening a speed dial entry (Opera=<12). I would actually like both of these functions, perhaps on alt+number and ctrl+number.

Ctrl-Tab/Ctrl-Shift-Tab (along with other tab management keys like Ctrl-T and Ctrl-W) are nice because you can hit them using only the left hand, with the right hand remaining on the mouse.

I prefer CTRL+TAB and CTRL+shift+TAB because they can be used with one hand moving the hand only slightly from its natural resting position. It also remains essentially identical on almost any keyboard. Neither of these are true for CTRL+PGUP and CTRL+PGDN.

I don't remember X tabs back either, but you can't go back and forth between two tabs unless you place them next to each other and then use two separate shortcuts. That's a deal-breaker for me.

I strongly disagree with parts of your post. I just now learned that there is something like "MRU". I've tried to search for a Chrome extension that does it before, without luck. I don't see why they should be mutually exclusive. I use Ctrl+(Shift+)Tab a lot (in addition to Alt+1-9) but would also like to "Go back to the previous tab" using some OTHER keyboard shortcut.

edit: Just tried Vivaldi and they've disabled both of those shortcuts that I use ALL THE TIME. Makes it more or less unusable.

> Makes it more or less unusable.

As is Chrome for me because they disabled ctrl+tab :)

Either way, I think we can agree, that shortcuts should be something that user can configure.

What do you mean they disabled ctrl+tab in chrome? I use it all the time!

It's nice, but for me only useful if it's combined with the old Opera's "click tab to minimize", so that you can click the active tab to access the previously-used one. That's the feature that made the Opera the tab bar consistent with the behavior of Windows task bar and MDI application bars, which IMHO is great.

+1 for MRU

Who even finds "select tab to the right" useful??

For the people who were confused like I was, MRU stands for most recently used...

I for example. I like the controls matching the state of the screen. It's more predictable that way.

The placement of newly opened tabs / ctrl+opened links is on the other hand something I always find wrong in most browsers. It's seem there's no logic pattern in that.

I couldn't get used to MRU because then I can't get to the tab I want without looking away / breaking my train of thought. Once you know the tab you want is three tabs to the right, you can get to it by muscle memory. You can't build a mental index with MRU because the items keep moving around (but maybe tracking MRU lists is an acquired mental skill).

By default, many browsers also arrange tabs in an order I find not entirely optimal. Tree Style Tabs / Tab Mix Plus help here.

Writing this comment made me go and set up a non-MRU way to switch between windows (7TT has a hidden option for this - no good TWMs on Windows, sadly).

In old Opera you were shown an ordered list of tabs when using ctrl+tab (as you have in window managers). Not exactly what you were talking about, but it was not just random guessing as for which tab will pop up next. You saw how many you had to go, or you could use a mouse. You have other shortcuts for go left/right when those make sense.

Also, my biggest issue is with the inability to change this behavior. So I don't think there is one right way to do things (as there obviously isn't). I think such option should be included in settings, or at least let it be possible via extension (as is in FF). By the way, request for this option is one of the top voted issues in chromium (like in top 10 of all time I think), yet it was closed as WONTFIX without any comment from developers.

Yes, I used Opera for many years until I reluctantly switched to Firefox. The MRU popup still adds a mental load because you have to visually scan the tab list and know at which tab to stop at. Alt+Tab suffers from the same problem.

> or you could use a mouse

I try to not use the mouse, even while browsing the web. One of the reasons I liked Opera was the excellent spatial navigation feature, which sadly has no good equivalent in other browsers currently. Vivaldi claims to reimplement it, so that's interesting, but at this point I'm not going to risk more lock-in by switching from an open-source browser to a closed-source one.

I do (although I guess it's because that's how the browser works currently) - when I hit ctrl tab in FF, I know that the browser will move to the tab to the right, and ctrl shift tab will move left. If I check email, or open a tab to read during the day, and come back to my browser later on, I can't necessarily remember which tabs I used most recently.

I do? My tabs are ordered and I prefer to traverse them in the order I can visualize at the top of the browser. I'd prefer not to keep track of which tab I happened to view last.

+1 for affordances and maintaining the visual order of tabs.

MRU drives me batty. It mostly makes sense for applications (Alt+Tab et al.) but for documents like webpages the "index" is right there in my tab bar. Why expect me to remember the order I last looked at them?

On a related note, Shift+Cmd+[] doesn't work in Vivaldi for tab switching, unlike every other browser on OS X. Dealbreaker for me.

Have you tried to configure it manually? There's an option for previous/next tab shortcut in options menu, but not all key combinations seem to work.

As for your first remark, why not both? MRU is most useful for cycling between two (or similarly low number) tabs. It's not possible with "go right" function. You have (and "always" had) other shortcuts for spatial switching, which makes sense in some situations. So you can (and do) use those. Why remove functionality for key combo that works like that in other environments? Also, you have the "index" right there in your OS as well.

Me, and probably anyone who uses a browser with something closer to ten than ten thousand tabs. I don't keep a list of the last 8 tabs I used in my head.

It's more predictable bc of the visual.

MRU tab switching is most annoying 'feature' ever

it's like having random switching

I do. Thanks for asking.

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