Oops, I clicked a random tab, now I can’t find my previous tab.
Surely there is a keyboard shortcut to go back where I was ?
Note : I have 2185 tabs open in 21 windows
Alt-F4
I tried, it said
So, I said no
Sorry, I’ll be honest, I find your browsing methods offensive, I think 2185 tab is ridiculous and you should be shutting that shit down, looking at my wife’s phone with 150 tabs makes me anxious and I avoid it … but then it also occurs to me that you should be doing you.
I don’t know of a keyboard shortcut that could find your previous tab, but you were on the tab recently, did you refresh it? could it be in your recent history? This makes me vomit in my mouth a bit … but could you open yet another tab with the same page from your browser history?
Alternatively if your scroll position on the tab matters, could you use the down arrow to the right of the infinite accordion of tabs at the top of your window and use the “Search Tabs” option to find the tab using the name of the site from your search history?
I came here directly after reading a post about the important of rage bait awareness… this is fucking hilarious
I see from your other post that you already found it, but also have 100s of tabs with the same name, this is wild. I just can’t even grasp why you would want this for yourself. Good luck.
I’m not going to be wasting my time, closing and sorting tabs, I have many thousands of pages to read and I can’t be spending half my time deciding when and whether I am done with this or that group of thousand more tabs.
I have tab manager plus for searching tabs, and most of the time this works great when I’ve lost of a tab. But there’s one really annoying trouble, it can only search tab titles, it cannot search the content of tabs.
This is a severe limitation but far from the only one. Bookmarks don’t even save the information inside the tab, the browser just assumed the information on the server could be retrieved forever so it does not save any of it.
I could go on all day about all the limitation of this browser but it’s still the best. The cutting edge is a blunt knife from 1996.
As for the browser history, the pages are listed in order of opening date
So that doesn’t help find my tab, which could be any one of the thousands of tabs.
My ideal browser, could search find a video, based on a loose text description, without accessing the internet to do it.
But we are really far from that !
I see things sometimes and I’m like yeah i should read that and I bookmark it and then its gone to the void, never to be heard from again. On my phone I leave the tab open and its the same thing, but pretty regularly I go in and maybe bookmark some, or just kill the rest. If i don’t read it then and there, its unlikely I’m working my way back to find the thing. Even if i save a post, its rarely getting a look in. Sometimes I look at my youtube watch later videos, but I’m probably not saving anything on current events in that.
Yes the current system basically cannot handle this much information. At some point there is no choice but to take the whole thing and send it to the trash bin (bookmarks)
Bruh WTF, don’t do that :/
😆
There’s an option in the settings to make Ctrl+Tab cycle by last used tabs instead of the order they appear in in the tab bar. I have that turned off, so can’t tell you 100% whether it does what you want…
Otherwise of course if you still know the name of the tab, just type whatever you can remember into the address bar, that is how I find tabs usually.
I can’t use ctrl+tab, first because it will wake up every tab that I sequentially go through. And second, because that I will have to go through hundreds of tabs this way.
Actually, I tried and this is what it looks like this, so it seems ctrl+tab no longer cycles through tabs ?
My tab wasn’t in this listI found my tab, the title didn’t help, it only had the name of the website, of which I have hundreds of tabs open, so I couldn’t find it. I ended up using “tab manager plus” and finding which tabs in the list weren’t discarded tabs. Still very tedious.
I notice this happens often. When ever I open a tab from the taskbar, then I can’t find my way back to the tab I was on, since they open at the very end on the tab list.
It’s weird, there doesn’t seem to be a “go to previous tab” keyboard binding !?
The person you’re replying to solved your problem. Read what they wrote and stop freaking out.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/851489
Someone else had a similar or same question too. This is the discussion on Mozilla support on it.
That said, 2185? Don’t be miserly, come on, hit that sweet 2200 already
First off, wow… How do you have 2185 tabs open and 21 windows? That’s impressive and infuriating.
Utilize tab groups. Organize a bit.
What possible purpose could you have for that many tabs?
I don’t have the time to organize those thousands of tabs. I heard they introduce tab groups, but I find them very annoying. I occasionnaly “tag group” some tabs, not sure how exactly it’s happenning but I just ungroup them.
I don’t group them, I don’t have the time for that. They should just group themselves. I had an add on that would take all tabs from all windows that were from a particular domain, and pull them out into their own window, what was very useful, but it broken in a recent update.
tab manager plus does something similar but it’s quite a few extra steps, but it can also use search terms to perform the same thing
What possible purpose could you have for that many tabs?
Tab accumulate because I am not willing to give them an evalution to know if I am done with them or not.
Ideally they should get auto sorted by project and date and be able to summon back when I revisit whatever topic this is about. But there’s no automatic way to do that which doesn’t involved a lot of manual manipulation so I don’t. It just blobs up into a mass of 10000 tabs, then I save it into the bookmark folder where they are probably never seen again. Since the bookmark manager as it currently exist, is super useless.
Sounds like a workflow issue.
Based on your other comments here, you should probably start organizing your tabs before your browser simply crashes.
When the tab count goes over 5000, I dump alll of them in a bookmark folder and start all over again.
it might not help if you don’t know the name of it but there’s also a list all tabs button in the toolbar which lets you search and filter tabs.
I commend your tab hoarding. I just want to know how much RAM you have to support that. I have 32 GB, Firefox won’t load them until I click on them, and it still struggles at 100 tabs.
I have 64 gb I reboot daily or else the system becomes unusable.
Most tabs aren’t loaded since it takes often many gigabytes to display simple text pages in 2025.
I have no way to know how many actually active tabs I have but it’s not more than a few dozens and then firefox just starts deleting data from memory as if it could be obtained again later.
If you’re not against them, you could try vertical tabs with the Sidebery extension. It has a shortcut (not bound by default) to flip between the pervious tab and current tab.
Thanks I’ll check it out. I had sidebery install but never really used it and didn’t think of re-installing on my latest OS wipe.
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