Enable Firefox’s Open Existing Tab Feature in Google Chrome
By on March 18th, 2011

has a lot of new features (Read Firefox 4 Beta Review | Read Firefox 4 RC Review) which are pretty good. One of the feature which improves tab management in 4 is the ability to switch to open tabs from the Awesome bar.

chrome_focus_open_tab

This feature allows you to type a URL or title of the page and jump to an open tab instead of opening a new tab. does not have this feature in the current stable version. However, if you are using the development version of Google Chrome or Canary Build of Chrome, you can enable this feature in the browser.

To enable the Open Existing Tab feature in development or Canary build version of Chrome, open a new tab and type about:flags and hit Enter. Now scroll down to the bottom of the page and Enable the feature Focus existing tab on open.

Once you have enabled this feature, Chrome will take you to an existing open tab instead of opening a new tab. This is definitely handy when you have several tabs open and don’t want to search for the tab you are looking for or open another unnecessary tab. Kudos to Mozilla for thinking of this feature.

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Author: Keith Dsouza Google Profile for Keith Dsouza
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  • smokes

    but what if i want to have 2 pages opened on the same site? maybe seeing the difference or some testing?

    • http://keithdsouza.com Keith Dsouza

      Hi Smokes – Could not test that out. Chrome requires a restart on changing the existing tab feature and does not allow you to open a second tab with the same URL when one already exits. I will fish around and let you know once I research more about it.

 
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