MRU should always be the default, this is also what IDE's do, and alt+tab does with main windows.
What is even the point of ctrl+tab cycling to next tab? You got to press it dozens of times to go back to the original tab... Why would anyone use that? You can use ctrl+pgdn and pgup to go to next/previous which is more sensible for this.
So disappointingly, now I turned this feature on in FF, and I'm disappointed to see that it only cycles through most recent tab of current window. I wish it would go through any window. I have always dozens of windows with dozens of tabs each, and I find myself sometimes just opening the same URL again due to not bothering trying to find back a tab I was in just a few minutes ago due to not having a ctrl+tab that goes to most recent tab in any window.
ctrl+tab cycling to the next tab is essential for many ways of surfing the web.
For instance, research a topic and tap up many tabs. Now go through them one by one. And in the process of doing so you might want to tab up even more.
At this point cycling to the next tab becomes a way to navigate the history, but where you have the context of each step preserved. MRU in this context is a nightmare.
MRU for tabs doesn't make any sense to me, that purpose is served by switching to another window instead (which is, and should be, MRU).
finding back your tab amongst the many open ones is a nightmare without some form of easily accessed recently used list that also works across windows
>finding back your tab amongst the many open ones is a nightmare without some form of easily accessed recently used list that also works across windows
not at all, they are ordered and you already know the direction you want to go. Unlike MRU that breaks down completely after a few tabs.
As soon as you have to search for anything the MRU is poisoned beyond sense and you have to start all over again.
Opening multiple tabs from one place, and then going through them exactly in that order, is just not something that happens often for me.
> As soon as you have to search for anything the MRU is poisoned beyond sense and you have to start all over again.
Not at all. Imagine you were reading some document in some tab. This tab could be in any window, on any workspace.
Now you check your email in-between, which is another tab in another window.
Now after checking your email, you want to go back to the document you were reading: try finding it back amongst all windows across all desktops, possibly not anymore the front tab because you also just opened a link from the document, or instinctively opened the discord tab of the window the document was in or paused some youtube music that was playing, or whatever!
MRU solves that perfectly. We're talking about 100s of tabs across multiple windows here. With MRU you only have to go through maybe max 10 or so, which is easy to find the document back in.
Its likely more useful for those who tend towards many tabs open at once
A) name tab groups;
B) lock specific groups which mimics the capability of bookmark folders (clicking a link doesn’t remove it from the group).
The extension has helped me reduce the number of open windows on my laptop, among other productivity improvements.
I must admit, however, that I do have Tab Flip for Tree Style Tab, with Shift+F2 to switch between the current and most recently selected tabs (like Ctrl+6 in Vim to toggle between the most recent buffers), and have added similar elsewhere, with Meta+F2 to switch between most recent workspaces in the Sway or i3 window managers:
I wouldn’t want to be without at least this single-level MRU in my browser or window manager. (On more traditional window managers, you normally have Alt+Tab or ⌘⇥ and ⌘` which are all some form of more extensive MRU list, though I find macOS’s application-level treatment bizarre and extraordinarily frustrating because of how cripplingly limiting it is if you work with multiple multi-window apps and want to see a window of each. And yeah, it’s easy to see when reflecting on Alt+Tab why Firefox went the way they did with Ctrl+Tab, making it behave similarly. But I haven’t previously found anyone actually liking it.)