Although all programs today are designed to be used with the mouse, keyboard shortcuts are still very present in practically all of them, allowing us to perform certain tasks much more quickly and easily without having to lift our hands from the mouse. When it comes to browsing the Internet, we are sure to know some Chrome keyboard shortcuts, such as Control + T, Control + Shift + N or the mythical F5. However, there is something that users of this browser have always lacked: being able to better manage open tabs.
Modern web browsing is based on tabs. No one navigates today by opening a browser window for each website that we are going to load as it was done before. While we browse, we usually open all the websites that we are reading within the same browser window. And it’s even easy to have two or more windows open, each with its respective tabs.
However, something we’ve been missing for quite some time is the ability to sort open tabs in the browser directly using keyboard shortcuts. This feature has been available on macOS and Linux for quite some time now, but it never made its way to Windows users. Until now.
These are the new Google Chrome keyboard shortcuts
The Canary branch of Google Chrome, the most advanced and unstable, has reached version 102. And, among the news and the changes that it will bring, we can find a series of new keyboard shortcuts for Windows. These shortcuts are designed so that users can reorder open browser tabs without having to pick up the mouse. And we will be able to do this by learning the following key combinations:
- Control + Shift + Page Up/Page Down -> Move the current tab to the left or right.
This new keyboard shortcut joins the existing ones related to tabs that allow us to move freely between all the websites that we have open in the browser, such as:
- Control + Page Up/Page Down -> Switch between tabs.
- Control + W -> Close a tab.
- Control + T -> Open a tab.
For now, these new keyboard shortcuts are only available to users who try the Canary version of the browser. This version for developers, which we can download from here , stands out for being more advanced than the stable version, but it can have very serious bugs and problems, so it is not a recommended version for all users.
If everything goes ahead, these new keyboard shortcuts will arrive in June of this year, when version 102 of Google Chrome makes its appearance for everyone.
Also in other browsers
This new change is not going to be exclusive to Chrome, but Google has added its changes in the “Chromium” part of it. This means that any web browser that uses this engine will be able to receive these new keyboard shortcuts with a simple update.
Microsoft is already working on being able to add this functionality within its Edge browser so that its users can start working better with tabs as soon as possible. In addition, we will also find it in other browsers such as Opera or Vivaldi, who will also be able to allow users to use these two new keyboard shortcuts.