If you’re a Firefox user, you know how to use the “alt-tab” feature to move between different tabs in your browser. But what if you want to do it in a more traditional way, using the “desktop” tab instead? There’s a way to do that with TabNavigator, a Firefox add-on that lets you move between different tabs on your desktop using the mouse. Here’s how:

  1. Open TabNavigator and click on the “Desktop” tab. This will take you to your desktop’s main window, where all of your tabs are listed in order from top to bottom.
  2. Drag one of your tabs off of the top of the screen and onto the “Desktop” tab. You can also right-click on one of them and choose “Move To Desktop.” This will take you to your desktop’s main window, where all of your tabs are listed in order from top to bottom again.
  3. Click on one of yourtabs and drag it off of the “Desktop” tab and onto the “Tab Navigation” tab. This will take you back to your original desktop location for that tab (assuming it was still open when you moved it).

Note: TabNavigator version 1.0.3 shown here.

Setup

Once you have the extension installed, you should take a moment to view the options. Here you can see the default setup for TabNavigator. You can make adjustments for Icon List Appearance (small, medium, or large), Preview Properties for open tabs, and make changes if desired for Keyboard Shortcuts.

TabNavigator in Action

Here you can see the Icon List Sub-window and Tab Previews both activated (very nice!). If you have a lot of tabs with identical icons open, then having the Tab Previews activated can be really helpful.

Use the keyboard shortcut (default or your own personal selection) to switch between tabs and when you have found the tab that you want to view, simply let go of the keys. For our example we have the Tab Preview set at 550 pixels in width.

If you prefer to use the Icon List Sub-window only, then it will appear in the middle of your browser window as shown below. Notice that webpage titles also display for the tab selected in the Icon List Sub-window. In both screenshots we have icon size set as Small.

TabNavigator with only the Tab Previews activated.

Conclusion

If you enjoy Alt-Tab style window switching, then TabNavigator is definitely an extension worth adding to your Firefox browser!

Links

Download the TabNavigator extension (Mozilla Add-ons)