How to navigate Safari tabs with your Mac keyboard

When you have several open tabs in Safari, switching among them with your mouse or trackpad can be a chore. This is because it can be tough to click the tiny tab icons at the top of your Safari screen. But with the help of keyboard shortcuts, things can get a bit convenient.

In this tutorial, we show you some handy keyboard shortcuts to switch tabs in Safari on Mac.

Safari running on MacBook

Keyboard shortcuts for switching Safari tabs on Mac

Control + Tab: This lets you cycle through your open tabs from left to right. On reaching the last tab, it again starts cycling from the first tab.

Control + Shift + Tab: This lets you cycle through your open tabs from right to left. On reaching the first tab, it again starts cycling from the last tab.

Shift + Command + left or right arrow key: You can switch tabs in Safari with this key combination. In practice, this shortcut is like the above two mentioned above.

In addition to the above shortcuts, there’s another trick that’s even quicker. You can switch directly from one tab to another with the help of only two keys.

Press Command + 1 to 8 on your numeric keypad. The numbers on your keypad will correspond with the order and count of the tabs currently active.

In other words, pressing:

  • Command + 1 will take you to the first tab.
  • Command + 2 will take you to the second tab, and so on.
  • Command + 8 will take you to the eighth tab.

Note: Pressing Command + 9 will not take you to the ninth tab. Instead, it will take you to the last tab.

The main advantage of this method is that you have eliminated the need to cycle through every single tab in order to get to your destination. Instead, you now get to immediately jump from your current tab past all the idle ones, directly to wherever you need to be next.

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