If you work with a lot of tabs in Firefox, sometimes you may want to move them to different positions in the tab bar. Say you are reading an article in Google Reader, which is opened at the far left tab of Firefox. At the same time, you are writing a blog post in another tab which is at the far right.

You want to place both the tabs adjacent to each other so that you can read the article and quickly write the covering story in the other tab.

The general way of moving tabs is to click the desired browser tab, drag it to the new position and release it. There is again another keyboard shortcut for highlighting a particular tab using Control + Number, but this is not very useful when you have more than a dozen tabs open. You have to manually count the number of tabs from the far left to the present position, which is quite old school.

MoveTabs is a Firefox extension which lets you move Firefox tabs using keyboard shortcuts.

Once the extension is installed, you can switch the position of any tab using the following keyboard shortcuts:

• Control + Shift + Home: Moves the current tab to the extreme left position
• Control + Shift+ End: Moves the current tab to the extreme right position
• Control + Shift+ Page Up: Moves the current tab one position to the left
• Control + Shift + Page Down: Moves the current tab one position to the right.

Now here is a trick. Suppose you have opened 15 tabs in Firefox and you are currently on the 3rd tab. You want to quickly jump to the 14th tab which is somewhere lying down the right end of the tab bar. Instead of hitting the arrow key on the tab bar and scrolling through the open tabs – use Control + Shift + End and then Control + Shift + Tab. Done !

Here are some more useful keyboard shortcuts for tabbed browsers.

Using these shortcuts you can save a good amount of time, especially when you reading something and writing it on another browser tab. Got any favorite keyboard shortcut trick ? Let’s hear them in the comments.