The Window and Tabs
The parts of the window
- The tab panel, on the left, lists your tabs from top to bottom. New tab is at its foot.
- The top bar holds Back, Forward, Reload, the address bar and the
…menu. - The page fills the rest.
Drag the window by the top bar or by any empty part of the tab panel. Drag the panel's right edge to make it wider or narrower. Ctrl+Shift+B, or the button at the panel's top, folds it down to a column of icons.
Tabs are a tree
A tab opened from a link sits under the tab it came from, indented. A search with five results opened from it reads as one branch, not six unrelated tabs.
- Open a link in a new tab with
Ctrl+click or a middle click (in the background),Ctrl+Shift+click (shown at once), orShift+click (in a new window). - Fold a branch with the arrow beside a tab that has tabs under it.
- Move a tab by dragging it up or down among the tabs beside it. The tabs under it come along. A tab cannot be moved under a different tab, because where it sits says which page opened it.
- Close a tab with its
×,Ctrl+W, or a middle click on it. Its children move up a level. - Right-click a tab to reload, duplicate or mute it, show its trail in History, or close the tabs below it or all the others.
Ctrl+Shift+Treopens the tab you closed last, with its history intact.
The address bar
Type an address to go to it, or words to search for them. As you type, the bar lists matching pages from your history and bookmarks; the arrow keys choose one. Alt+Enter opens what you typed in a new tab.
The icons in the bar:
- The padlock at the left says whether the connection is encrypted. Click it for the site panel: the site's certificate, and the permissions the site has. A red warning there means the site's certificate is not trusted.
- The shield shows how many requests were blocked on the page. Click it to turn blocking off for the site. See Privacy and Blocking.
- The key appears on a page with a sign-in form or a saved password. See Passwords.
- The star bookmarks the page (
Ctrl+D), with a name, a folder and tags.
The search engine is chosen in Settings: Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Brave Search or Startpage. Google searches open its plain Web results, without the generated answer above them.
Sleeping tabs
A tab you have not looked at for an hour goes to sleep. Its page is let go, which frees the memory and stops whatever it was doing, and its row in the panel dims. Click it and the page loads again; Back still works as before.
A tab stays awake while it is playing sound, has something typed into a form, is downloading, is asking you a question, or has DevTools open.
Settings ▸ Unused tabs changes the wait to 15 minutes or 4 hours, or turns sleeping off.
The browser's own pages
The … menu opens them, each in a tab:
| Page | Address | Key |
|---|---|---|
| New tab | lightning://newtab/ |
Ctrl+T |
| History | lightning://history/ |
Ctrl+H |
| Bookmarks | lightning://bookmarks/ |
Ctrl+Shift+O |
| Downloads | lightning://downloads/ |
Ctrl+J |
| Passwords | lightning://passwords/ |
|
| Settings | lightning://settings/ |
Bookmarks have folders, tags and notes, and can be imported from Chrome, Edge or Brave or from an exported HTML file.
Language
Settings ▸ Language offers English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語 and 한국어. The browser starts in your Windows language when it is one of these. The pages change at once; the window's own menus and the right-click menu on a page change when the browser restarts, and Settings offers a Restart button that brings your tabs back.
Making it the default browser
Settings ▸ Default browser ▸ Make default opens Windows Settings at the right place. Windows only lets you make that choice yourself, there.
When a page can't be shown
If a page crashes or runs out of memory, the tab says so in its place and offers Reload. If a site's certificate can't be trusted, the tab explains why instead of loading it; see Certificates.
Printing and PDF
Ctrl+P prints the page through the system's print dialog. Save as PDF in the … menu saves the page as a PDF file, laid out as it would print. PDF files open in the browser, with their own toolbar for zoom, rotation, download and print.
Links from other programs
A link you open in another program - an email, a chat, a code editor - opens in a new tab of the window you used last, and the window comes to the front. If the browser is not running, it starts and opens the link. A link opened while the browser is still closing waits for it to finish, then starts it again with the link.