Aswath's Blog

Shortcut for switching tabs in Browser

Nov 9, 2018

While browsing the internet, opening multiple tabs is a habit for many of us. Let's say you wanted to learn about GatsbyJS and you search for the keyword "GatsbyJS" in your search engine. If you are using a good search engine, you will see Gatsby's official page first. You will click on the first link and start exploring it. Then you see the term "static site generator" and you wanted to know what it is without leaving the current page. So, you will open a new tab and search about Static Site Generators. You will find some more information about it and there also you will find some other term that you don't understand. Again you will search for that. I hope you also do this. I at least fill my knowledge gap like this. And after a couple of iterations, I will know enough to understand what I was searching for initially. (But, most of the times I end up in a rabbit hole)

For switching from one tab to another, I used to use a mouse until my friend JD (@kmjayadeep) told me about the shortcut Ctrl + Tab (Switch to next tab) and Ctrl+ Shift + Tab (Switch to the previous tab). Using a mouse to do this operation was taking ~2 seconds whereas the shortcut was taking less than a second. Let's say 500ms. By using the shortcut, I was saving 1.5s. Let's assume I do this operation at least 200 times a day, it is saving me 5 minutes a day. ~30 hours a year.

Thanks, JD for helping me to save my time! 😬