Switchy - Dynamic Tab Switcher

About

Switchy brings Firefox's best tab-switching feature to Chrome.

If you've ever used Firefox, you know how good its Ctrl+Tab switcher feels — it doesn't cycle through tabs left-to-right, it cycles through them in the order you actually used them. Switchy does exactly that for Chrome.

How it works

Press Ctrl+Q and a visual overlay appears showing all your open tabs as cards, sorted by most-recently-used. The second card (the tab you were on before this one) is pre-selected — tap Ctrl+Q again to advance further back in your history, or just release Ctrl to jump instantly. It works exactly like Firefox.

Key features

🔁 True MRU cycling — tabs are ordered by when you last visited them, not by their position in the tab bar. The tab you want is always near the front.

🖼 Live tab thumbnails — Switchy captures a screenshot every time you switch tabs, so you can see what's actually on each page at a glance.

⌨️ Keyboard-first design

Ctrl+Q — open the overlay / cycle to next recent tab
Ctrl+Q (hold Ctrl, press Q again) — keep cycling forward through history
← → or Tab / Shift+Tab — move between cards
Enter or click — jump to that tab
Escape — close the overlay and stay where you are
Release Ctrl — commit immediately (Firefox-style release-to-jump)
🎨 Clean overlay UI — dark frosted-glass panel, smooth animations, tab favicons, and titles. Stays out of the way until you need it.

🔒 Privacy-first — no data leaves your browser. Tab titles, URLs, thumbnails, and favicons are stored only in session memory and cleared when you close the browser. No analytics, no tracking, no external requests from the page itself.

⚡ Works on any tab — even tabs that were open before you installed the extension. Switchy injects itself on demand so nothing is missed.

Why not Ctrl+Tab?

Chrome reserves Ctrl+Tab at the browser level — no extension can intercept it. Switchy uses Ctrl+Q by default, but you can change it to any shortcut you like at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.

Permissions explained

tabs — read tab titles, URLs, and favicons to build the switcher list
storage — keep the MRU history and thumbnail cache during your browser session
scripting — inject the overlay into tabs that were open before the extension was installed
activeTab — capture the visible tab screenshot when you switch
host permissions — fetch favicons from any site so they display correctly in the overlay (all fetches happen in the background; the overlay itself never makes network requests)