When did Firefox and Chrome decide to remove the ability to switch between the latest two used tabs with CTRL+Tab?

The Water Cooler
, ,
1

First, hello, I am a happy Fedora user about 1.5 years, so I decided to engage on the fedora discussion platform.

So let’s begin.

Every software, like browser, desktop environment, window manager has a way of switching, or “alt-tabbing” between two windows or tabs being used, and I remember both Firefox and Chrome have this option by default.

Since when, and most importantly, why did they both decide to remove this behavior as a default?

At least in Firefox, this can be enabled in Settings → General → Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order

But why, did they change this at all? Is cycling through tabs objectively more useful than switching between the last two used tabs?

2

For Firefox, this Bugzilla ticket might be a good starting point: 1746804 - Stop clearing browser.ctrlTab.recentlyUsedOrder when migrating the pref (was: browser.ctrlTab.sortByRecentlyUsed set to false when upgrading from esr78 to esr91)

OP (in December 2021) says that “recently used order” was changed to be false by default, and links to a few related tickets. Those should say something about the history and rationale.

1 Like