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Stupid Geek Tricks: Duplicate a Tab with a Shortcut Key in Chrome or Firefox

One of the best things about our Stupid Geek Tricks series is that we get to share those tiny little tips that only geeks pay any attention to. They aren’t always terribly useful, but it’s fun to learn new tricks. Today we’ll show you how to duplicate a tab the easy way in Chrome or Firefox.

Today’s tip is brought to us thanks to How-To Geek reader Konc.

First, use the Alt+D shortcut key sequence to move the focus to the location bar… and keep the Alt key held down.

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Now simply hit the Enter key (since you’ve got the Alt key held down). This will open up the current URL into a new tab, basically duplicating the tab.

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Once you’ve done it once or twice, you’ll realize that it’s extremely easy to use—just use Alt, D, Enter, and the tab is duplicated.

The same thing works in Chrome as well, and is the only way that we know of to duplicate a tab from the keyboard.

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Note that you can duplicate a tab with the mouse in Chrome by simply right-clicking the tab.

Duplicate with Tab Mix Plus (Firefox)

If you are one of the many Tab Mix Plus users, you can always duplicate a tab with the context menu, or with the Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut key.

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The nice thing about the Tab Mix Plus variety is that it’ll keep all of the history in the duplicated tab. Then again, that’s a lot of extra memory that Firefox doesn’t necessarily need to use, so you might prefer to stick with the first shortcut key if you don’t need the history.

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This article was originally written on 10/22/09 Tagged with: Firefox, Firefox & Web

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Comments (7)

  1. Deschi

    Thanks for this very good tip. But in the German Version of FireFox you need Ctrl + L or F6 to move the focus to the location bar because Alt + D opens the File menu (in German –> Datei). Alt + Return works in German version of FireFox and duplicates the current tab.

    Regards

    Deschi

  2. jtng45

    another easy way to duplicate is to Ctrl + Click and drag a tab and move it to the right or left, and that’s it.

  3. Jean-Francois Messier

    Under Firefox, you can also do a drag’n'drop while holding Ctrl. It will also duplicate the tab. What I don’t know is whether it will also duplicate the browsing history of the tab.

  4. The Geek

    That Ctrl + Drag tip is pretty cool, thanks!

  5. Konc

    Alt+D, Alt+Enter also works in IE (but then again, who uses that browser anymore?)

  6. Casey

    Middle-clicking the Refresh button on Firefox works best for me. It doesn’t duplicate the history, though.

  7. calebstein

    You can also do Ctrl t, Ctrl z, Ctrl z, Enter.


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