Control which tab gets the focus when you close a tab in Safari

Mar 17, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: canisbos

When you close a tab in Safari, the one that gets the focus (becomes active) is the one that was to its right (unless you are closing the last tab, in which case the one that was next to last gets the focus). If you sometimes wish the tab on the left would get the focus, you can have that with the help of a free extension called Tabkeys.

The main purpose of the extension is to let you assign your own keyboard shortcuts to various actions involving tabs. One of the supported actions is closing the current tab, and Tabkeys has a setting that determines which tab will get the focus when you do that.

The only catch is, in order for the tab-focusing feature to work, you have to close the tab using your assigned hotkey. If you close it any other way, such as by clicking its close box or pressing Command-W, the feature has no effect. I use the W key for closing tabs, and this has become second nature to me. (Such unmodified hotkeys have no effect inside text boxes and other editable elements.)

[crarko adds: There was a previous hint about this author's Safari Extensions, but I've used this one myself and thought it was worthy of note.]

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