Recent Tab Switch

A Chrome extension that switches tabs in most-recently-used order, the way Alt+Tab switches windows. Hold a modifier, tap the trigger key to cycle through your recent tabs, and release to land on the one you want. It's the Firefox-style "jump to the last tab" behavior that Chrome never shipped, with a visual switcher so you can see where you're going.

Why

Chrome's Ctrl+Tab walks tabs in strip order, left to right — rarely the tab you actually want. Most of the time you're bouncing between the two or three tabs you've touched recently. Recent Tab Switch tracks that order and puts the tab you were just on one keystroke away.

(Chrome reserves Ctrl+Tab for itself and won't let extensions bind it, which is why this uses a different, rebindable shortcut.)

How it works

Hold the trigger to open the switcher. It shows your recent tabs as a row of cards with titles, favicons, and an optional page thumbnail. Each extra tap steps one tab further back; add Shift to step the other way. Release the modifier to switch to the highlighted tab, or press Escape to back out and stay put.

The default trigger is Ctrl plus the key just right of the left Shift — easy to reach, and auto-detected per keyboard layout (< on ISO keyboards, ` on ANSI). You can rebind it to any combination on the Options page.

On pages where an overlay can't be drawn — chrome:// pages, the New Tab page, the Chrome Web Store — a browser command takes over instead: Alt+S to cycle forward, Alt+Shift+S to go back. These are rebindable at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.

Binding Ctrl+Tab

Chrome's shortcut UI won't accept Ctrl+Tab, but you can still assign it to the command via the internal developerPrivate API. Follow the console snippet in this Super User answer: run it on the chrome://extensions/shortcuts page, then bind the forward command to Ctrl+Tab and the reverse command to Ctrl+Shift+Tab. Once set, Ctrl+Tab drives the switcher everywhere.

Install from source

npm install
npm run build        # bundles to dist/, then typechecks

Then load it in Chrome:

1. Open chrome://extensions
2. Turn on Developer mode
3. Click "Load unpacked" and select this folder
4. Reload the extension after each rebuild

Use npm run watch to rebuild on change while developing. The shipped extension has no runtime dependencies.

Packaging for publication

npm run package

This builds the extension and writes a Chrome Web Store-ready zip to build/recent-tab-switch-v<version>.zip, containing only the files Chrome loads (manifest, dist/, icons, and the options page). Upload that zip in the Chrome Web Store Developer Dashboard.

To produce a .crx instead — for self-hosting or sideloading — open chrome://extensions, click "Pack extension", point it at this folder, and Chrome will sign a .crx with a key you keep. The Web Store does not need a .crx; the zip is enough.

Settings

Open the Options page (toolbar icon, or the extension's entry in chrome://extensions) to configure the trigger shortcut, how many recent tabs the switcher shows (default 5), whether to capture page thumbnails, a blocklist of domains that should never be screenshotted, and how the restricted-page fallback behaves (cycle through several tabs, or just toggle the last two). Settings sync with your Chrome profile, so they follow you across devices.

Good to know

• MRU order is tracked per window.
• Tabs that were open before you installed the extension work without a reload.
• chrome://, New Tab, Web Store, and similar pages can't be screenshotted, so they show as a favicon-and-title card.

Privacy

Everything runs on your device — no network calls, no analytics, no tracking. Thumbnails are small JPEGs kept in a local rolling cache, never synced or transmitted, and dropped when a tab closes. Incognito tabs and blocklisted domains are never captured. See PRIVACY.md for the full details.