Coming Around on ALT + TAB for Edge Tabs (Premium)

Like many of you, I had an immediate, visceral, and negative reaction to the news that Edge tabs were coming to the ALT + TAB keyboard shortcut (which was briefly called Windows Flip, though we don’t seem to use that term anymore). I’ve developed decades of muscle memory and, as a writer who likes to keep his hands on the keyboard as much as possible, I rely on keyboard shortcuts for virtually everything so that I can stay efficient. This makes change hard and unwelcome.

And yet.

The more I think about this change, the more I believe that it makes sense and is, in fact, the right thing to do. And while I know many of you will continue to disagree with that, take comfort in the fact that this change is at least accompanied by an out: In addition being able to configure how many tabs will appear in that ALT + TAB interface, Microsoft will allow us to turn it off completely. So those who are not interested in adapting to this change can continue to work as before.

This is important: Microsoft---and, I’m sure, other platform makers---doesn’t always let us walk back new or altered functionality, and just allowing us to reduce the number of browser tabs in the ALT + TAB interface wouldn’t address the complaint. So that’s good news.

This new system will require us all to adapt. But it also raises some questions.

One regards other apps that can display multiple documents in tabs. For example, many image editors---Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo among them---allow you to work with multiple images at once, each in their own tab. Should each of those tabs be placed into their own icon/thumbnail in ALT + TAB as well?

I’m going to say no: A web browser is uniquely suited to this usage because many if not most tabs represent something that most users would regard as a standalone app.

You may have seen my April write-up about me switching my three most-often-used web apps---Gmail, Google Calendar, and Twitter---from pinned taskbar shortcuts to being pinned within my primary browser window. This change required me to adapt from my to-then normal way of doing things. But I felt that it was worth changing, and I’ve stuck with it.

Under my old system, each of those web apps would have appeared in the ALT + TAB interface, since Windows 10 sees standalone web apps like any other apps. But under my new system, only the Microsoft Edge browser app appears in ALT + TAB. If I want to switch from, say, Microsoft Word to Google Calendar, I now need to type ALT + TAB some number of times to select Edge and then CTRL + TAB some number of times to arrive at the Calendar tab.

This is a contortion I handle seamlessly: I’ve been using Windows for decades, am arguably a power user, and I certainly know my way around the system with the keyboard. But most normal users would likely use the mouse for these operations, since most people---according to Microsoft---don’t even know about ALT + TAB, let alone CTRL + TAB.

Granted,...