Mouse Wheel Tab Switcher Chrome Extension — Alt+Scroll

Hold Alt and turn the wheel, and you move to another tab instead of scrolling the page. Alt+scroll is the SuperchargeNavigation mouse gesture for switching tabs: no toolbar click, no command to memorise, just a modifier and the wheel you are already holding. It is on by default and costs nothing.

What Alt+Scroll Does

Alt+scroll is a feature of the SuperchargeNavigation extension. Hold the Alt key and turn the mouse wheel, and your active tab moves to a neighbouring one in turn, rather than the page you are reading scrolling. Release Alt and the wheel behaves exactly as it always has.

Setup in Three Steps

1. Install SuperchargeNavigation from the Chrome Web Store.
2. Open any web page, so there is a page whose scrolling you are about to redirect.
3. Hold Alt and turn the mouse wheel. Your attention moves to the next tab up or down the list instead of the page scrolling.

There is nothing to configure for the gesture itself. It ships on, so step three works the moment the extension is installed. If it is not doing anything when you try it, check that Alt+scroll is enabled in SuperchargeNavigation’s settings.

What It Controls

How It Differs From the Alt+K Palette

The Alt+K command palette is SuperchargeNavigation’s search: a box in the active tab where you type to jump to a tab, run a command, or open a bookmark. It is built for “find the specific tab I am looking for.” Alt+scroll is the opposite motion: “just take me to the next one.” You cycle in order with the wheel, or you search by name with the palette.

The gesture is not Chrome’s old horizontal tab-strip scrolling, where turning the wheel dragged the strip sideways to reveal more tabs. Alt+scroll switches which tab is active. If you are after the sideways strip behaviour, that is a different change and this page is not it.

Permissions, Privacy and Compatibility

SuperchargeNavigation asks for a broad permission set (tabs, tabGroups, sidePanel, storage, alarms, scripting, declarativeNetRequest and the sessions, bookmarks and history families), plus host access to all URLs. The extension sends no usage analytics or telemetry, so which tabs you cycle through never leaves your device.

SuperchargeNavigation can also pause its own keystroke handling on a specific site through a per-site pause list. Add a hostname there and the extension’s keystroke handling stands down on that site.