thechromesource – Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Forum

7 Killer Google Chrome Tab Tricks

Posted on 04. Mar, 2011 by Daniel Cawrey in Chrome, Tips

Tabs are basically the taskbar in Chrome, if you want to think about it like and operating system. Being able to use them to their maximum benefit is important to being productive. Because of this, here are some great tips for you to better manage, modify and extend your tab experience. Hope these help you with your everyday tasks!

Keyboard Shortcuts You can use keyboard commands to switch tabs, much like ALT+TAB in Windows. To go from left to right, you can use CTRL+TAB or CTRL+PGDN. For right to left, use CTRL+SHIFT+TAB or CTRL+PGUP. Know how to switch in Mac? Leave a comment.

Reopen Closed Tabs It really sucks when you have to go scouring your history to find a closed tab. Using the TabJump extension, you can go back to your previous ten tabs that you closed. TabJump also organizes tabs that are related and frequently used into a nice window that you can reference from the Omnibox.

Making Sure Your Tabs Stay the Same You can specify under the Basics tab in your options menu which tabs open when you first start up Chrome. Just choose “Reopen the pages that were open last” or “Open the following pages:” where you can choose particular tabs.

Throw Tabs to the Side If you’re using more than one monitor, or your display is wider than most, you may benefit from putting your tabs on a sidebar. To do this, all you need to do is type in “about:flags” in the Omnibox, and find the “Side Tabs” feature in the list of options.

New Tab Page You can eliminate the new tab page if you don’t want it by changing that setting in the Basics tab of your Options menu. You can also make the new tab page a place for productivity by extending it. I like to use the Things To Do extension – a great reminder of stuff you need to get done every time you open a new tab.

Detach a Tab You can pull a tab from the lineup of other ones by clicking down on it and pulling it down while holding the mouse button down. This is a great way to get that tab into a new window if you need to be able to view something in a smaller window against another window of Chrome.

Kill Bloated Tabs You can get a good look at all of your tab processes by simply hitting SHIFT+ESC in Windows and CMD+OPT+ESC in Mac. This gives you an overview of all processes and their memory. It even will show you plugins, note how much memory that Adobe Flash is taking up!

Got a tab trick or hack? A cool tab extension? Let us know.

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