Scroll through your tabs quickly

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If you've got more than five or ten tabs (like many other people do), say 20, 60 or more, here's a few shortcuts that you'll love!

Scrolling Tabs Quickly

Position your mouse over the arrows at either end of the row of tabs (< or >).

Here: tab la or there:tab right arrow

When you've got your mouse cursor properly positioned,

tab scroll1

watch the row of tabs, when you go ahead, and try double-clicking ONCE (on either arrow).

tab scroll2c

Wow! It scrolled an entire screen's width of tabs! Please notice that the tabs above have changed, but the rest of the screen, still remains the same. This feature has been there all along. We wish we had informed you of this one, earlier.

But now, that you've got it down, go ahead, and use it, with confidence, at any point.

Is there another way to scroll my tabs?

Have you got a mousewheel?

Well, do you have a little tiny wheel built into your mouse?

If you do, you can position the mouse cursor, between the two arrows at each end, of the row of tabs. You can do this, by positioning the mouse cursor, inside the orange box below:

mouse wheel tab

Then try using your mouse wheel.

You should get used to which direction your screen scrolls, in response to your mouse wheel movement.

Any more ways to scroll my tabs?

Use that little button to engage the tab list

There is a tiny little button, you may have been ignoring. It does something wonderful. It looks like a really small downward triangle. downward triangle. Try clicking it here:

scroll tab3

If you do, you'll see this, or something a little bit smaller, perhaps, which does depend on how many tabs you have open.

scroll tab4

We've nicknamed it the "tab list". If you've got lots and lots of tabs open, it will look like the screen shown above. As you've probably noticed, there are a few areas of the screen above that we'll explain to you.

First, the area that's highlighted in green. This means where the tab is located, among all those tabs in the list. Notice that there's something different about the font of that tab? It is in bold, trying to draw your attention to it.

Second, is the area in yellow, which is under your mouse cursor. That's the one you're thinking about switching to. But wait a minute, what if the one you want to switch to isn't on your screen. Well you may not have that many tabs, this allows them to all fit on your screen.

But, third, if you do, yes, you guessed it, you can scroll the screen down (or up once you've scrolled down) by clicking on that really tiny, minuscule little arrow that's pointing down. It's outlined in pink. You can click it once (or actually anywhere in that skinny little strip) to only go down one tab, or, you can click and hold it down until it disappears! Well actually it didn't disappear, but it does look different, what gives? Well what happened is it took the black out of that tiny little shape, the arrow going down (or up as the case may be) when it reaches the limit, the bottom (or top) of the tab list.

So what you can do is practice it a little bit. Get comfortable with that. You can use it regularly, and impress anyone who is watching you switch tabs. Don't be surprised if someone asks you "How did you do that?".

We got one more trick for you...

You can use your Mousewheel in the tab list too!

Go through the step just above, to open up the tab list window.

Now that you have it open, try using your mousewheel. Yes, it does work with that window, rather than finding those pesky little buttons. Nice! Just try to get the hang of it, and realize which direction your mousewheel moves the list.


You can see how easy it is to use your tabs, and scroll'em or switch to them. Congratulations, you've mastered the easiest way to use one window with lots of your tabs, including the tab list! No need to open another window in Firefox!

We hope you're happier with Firefox, having spent this time, to learn these shortcuts to quickly scroll through your tabs, or switch to them, almost instantaneously.

 

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