Reopen closed tabs in Firefox with your keyboard

by Danny Mendez Jan 18th 2008

It happens to everyone, and it's annoying. Sometimes the wrong tab gets closed in Firefox, but it's OK. There's a solution to the problem, and it comes in the form of CTRL + SHIFT + T in Windows or COMMAND + SHIFT + T in Mac OS X.

We've covered other solutions in the past such as Unclosetab, a Firefox extension that adds a right-click option to reopen a closed tab. Another easy way to reopen a closed tab is simply to visit the Recently Closed Tabs menu under History.

And if you'd like to close the tab currently up, CTRL + W or COMMAND + W should do the trick. Now you have no excuse for your lady to catch you browsing the Apple Store late at night.

Tags: firefox, keyboard, reopen, short cut, short cuts, shortcut, shortcuts, tabs, unclose

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

GoOrange said 9:51AM on 1-18-2008

Wow. The number of things I don't know continues to amaze me. I was thinking the other day that I needed an easy way to bring back accidentally closed tabs. Looks like I've got one now!

Thanks.

Eijnok said 10:18AM on 1-18-2008

I'm running Firefox 3 Beta 2 and that feature is now built in, you just have to right click in the tab bar and its a undo close tab choise.

Taomyn said 10:28AM on 1-18-2008

It's part of v2 too, this is just saying how to access it.

Aalaap said 11:53PM on 1-18-2008

Undo close tab has always been a feature since FF2, but this CTRL-SHIFT-T is a quick and dirty shortcut that doesnt require you to 1) move your mouse to an unused tab strip area 2) right click 3) choose 'undo close tab'.

Taomyn said 10:28AM on 1-18-2008

If you have Tab Mix Plus installed you can also have a handy pull down toolbar menu that lists last "x" number of closed tabs so you can choose the one you want without going back through each one to find it.

kingkool68 said 11:01AM on 1-18-2008

While on the subject of tabs, you can also cycle through your tabs by holding cntrl + TAB (yes, even the control on the Mac) to go to the right, and Cntrl + Shift + TAB to go to the left.

I also like how you can hover your mouse over tabs and use your scroll wheel to shift your tabs left or right if you have a zillion tabs open and they won't all fit on the screen. This is better than using those tiny arrows on either side.

Shift+scroll wheel moves forward or backward in the browser history for the current tab or window.

HardwareGuy said 12:10PM on 1-18-2008

You can also increase the amount of tabs you can undo by going to about:config and changing the option named browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo

Paul said 10:16PM on 1-18-2008

....or you could just use Opera, because it had this feature with a nice trash icon from the get go... :-)

Kenny said 6:36AM on 1-22-2008

And your keyboard shortcut in Opera to re-open closed tabs is Ctrl+Alt+Z (Ctrl+Z alone will do it 99% of the time as well, because it simply undoes the last thing you did).

Sorry, Firefox didn't invent sliced bread.

Aalaap said 11:51PM on 1-18-2008

My life just changed :P

MeLeNaS said 3:19AM on 1-21-2008

Ctrl+F12 also re-opens an accidentally closed tab ;)

Rhysickle said 7:23AM on 1-25-2008

If you use tabmixplus you can set it up so a middle/right click of the mouse on the tab bar opens the last closed tab, and you can go up to 5 tabs back.

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