Microsoft announces feature coming to the app switcher

Jul 3, 2020 05:39 GMT  ·  By

I don’t know about you but the default Windows app switcher, which you can access by pressing Alt + TAB, is a critical OS feature that I use hundreds, maybe thousands, of times every day.

And it’s all because it makes jumping from one app to another much faster and doesn’t require turning to the mouse for clicking the window that I want to open.

And because I’m working mostly on a laptop without a mouse, it goes without saying that I’m using the keyboard more than the touchpad, so it’s easier to just switch apps using the Alt + TAB shortcut.

Earlier this year, however, I made the switch to Microsoft Edge, the new Chromium-based browser that’s also offered as the default Windows 10 option now. And after making the move, I almost immediately noticed something that needs to be improved in Windows 10, not only related to Microsoft Edge but to pretty much any browser running on Microsoft’s operating system.

Since most of the time I have several tabs loaded in the browser, switching from another app to Microsoft Edge and then to a different tab is something that’s not as convenient as it could be.

It’s because while I can open Microsoft Edge using the Alt + TAB shortcut, I then need to turn to a different shortcut – Ctrl + TAB – to change tabs. And while this works, as I said, it’s not as straightforward as it’s supposed to be.

Still in testing phase, no ETA.

And Microsoft is now fixing the whole thing, first for Microsoft Edge and I hope for other browsers too.

What the company does is just add Microsoft Edge tabs in the window switcher interface. In other words, when pressing Alt + TAB on your Windows 10 device, you should now see not only the running apps but also the tabs that are active in Microsoft Edge.

This means that if you want to jump directly to a specific tab in the browser, you can very well do that, so the whole thing happens faster without the need for turning to a different hotkey.

The change has recently been introduced in a Windows 10 preview build, and this is a sign that it’ll take a while until everybody gets their hands on it. It also requires a Canary or Dev build of Microsoft Edge, so it’s pretty clear the whole thing is still in its early days.

“Are you a multitasker? We have exciting news for you! Beginning with today’s build, all tabs open in Microsoft Edge will start appearing in Alt + TAB, not just the active one in each browser window. We’re making this change so you can quickly get back to whatever you were doing—wherever you were doing it,” Microsoft says.

I know what you’re thinking. What if I have 100 active tabs in Microsoft Edge? Wouldn’t that make the Alt + TAB interface really cluttered?

Nope. Windows 10 will come with dedicated options in this regard, including a new Multitasking page in the Settings app (under the System section) where you can configure the behavior of the updated app switcher. So what you can do is just configure the Alt + TAB experience to be limited to the last three or five tabs in the browser, which means the UI would be pretty clean most of the time.

And of course, you can also turn off this update if you just want to stick with the current Alt + TAB approach.

Unfortunately, there’s no ETA as to when the update could go live for everyone, as this is one of the features that are being tested without a specific release date.