Recency — Recent Tab Switcher

Switch between recently used tabs the way Command-Tab switches apps. Hold to cycle, release to commit. Private by design.

Recency brings the macOS Command-Tab feel to Chrome tabs. Tap the shortcut to jump straight back to the tab you were just on. Hold the modifier and press again to walk further back through a stable list of your recently used tabs. Let go, and it switches. That is the whole idea, and it works the way your hands already expect. Most last-used-tab extensions switch on every single key press, which means the browser flickers through every tab you pass over on the way to the one you wanted. Recency waits for you to let go. FEATURES • Release to commit. Nothing switches until you release the shortcut modifier, exactly like the app switcher. Cycle past five tabs and only the fifth one is ever activated. And while you are holding the key, no timer cuts you short: the switcher can see that your finger is still down, so it waits for you. • A stable list. The candidates are snapshotted when you press the shortcut and never re-sorted while the switcher is open, so repeated presses walk a predictable list instead of chasing one that reorders underneath you. • A quick tap is silent. The panel waits a moment before appearing, so bouncing between two tabs never flashes anything on screen. Adjustable, down to instant. • A switcher worth looking at. Favicon, title and site for every tab, with markers for pinned, playing audio and muted, and a label when a tab lives in another window. Compact, calm typography. Light and dark, following the page or pinned to your preference. • Backward cycling with Shift, exactly like Command-Shift-Tab. • Pick directly. Arrow keys, Tab and Shift+Tab, number keys 1 to 9 to jump straight to a tab (1 is the tab you were just on), Enter to open, Escape to cancel, or just point and click. • A picker that stays put. Click the toolbar icon for a switcher that ignores the modifier coming back up, for when you want to browse rather than flick. Escape or a click outside dismisses it, and it closes itself if you walk away. • Works across windows. Cycle into a tab in another Chrome window and that window comes forward with it. Or restrict the list to the current window, in settings. • Accessible. Full keyboard operation, a live region that announces the selection and its position, visible selection state, high-contrast support, and complete respect for "reduce motion". • Configurable. Theme, panel position, rows before scrolling, whether site names are shown, whether other windows are included, how long to wait before the panel appears, and both safety timeouts. Or turn the overlay off entirely for silent switching. • Your shortcut, whatever it is. Defaults are Alt+Q forward and Alt+Shift+Q backward (Option+Q on macOS). Rebind them in Chrome's own shortcut settings and the extension adapts on the next press — it reads what you actually have bound and watches that modifier for release. PRIVACY Recency uses the titles, URLs and activation order of currently open tabs locally to build the switcher. It sends nothing. There is no server to send it to. • No analytics, no telemetry, no accounts, no identifiers, no third-party code. • Zero network requests. Not on install, not on update, not while switching. Favicons come from the cache Chrome already keeps, so displaying the switcher never fetches anything. • Your tab order is never written to disk. It lives in memory-only session storage that Chrome clears when you quit. Only your settings are saved. • No host permissions and no access to all websites. The switcher is drawn in the tab you invoked it on, using activeTab, only at the moment you press the shortcut. • Page titles and site names go into the switcher; full URLs never leave the extension. • Incognito is fully separate. Incognito tabs and normal tabs never appear in the same list. • A page cannot drive the switcher. Faked keyboard and mouse events are ignored, so no site — and no advert frame on it — can cancel your switch, force it to commit, or choose which tab you land on. HONEST LIMITS Chrome does not let extensions see a key being released at the browser level — only a page can do that. On pages Chrome protects (chrome:// pages, the Chrome Web Store and other extensions' pages) the switcher cannot be drawn at all, and on a few more (Chrome's PDF viewer, and local files unless you grant file access) Chrome refuses the attempt. In every one of those cases the extension falls back to switching on each press with a short idle timer. Chrome also does not let any extension set your keyboard shortcuts for you; the settings page has a button that takes you to the right place. Invoking the switcher leaves a small script in that page until you navigate away, watching only which modifier keys are down. It is what makes holding the shortcut exact. Nothing is captured, stored or sent, and you can turn the overlay off entirely if you would rather nothing were injected at all. The full list is documented in the project repository rather than hidden. Open source, MIT licensed. Requires Chrome 116 or later.