Colored tabs can help here. It's easier to remember the color of the tab you were on than the title. Plus it's more general, so it can help it more situations, and it doesn't require remembering a key combination.

How about CTRL-Tab acting like ALT-tab, complete with MRU tabs ordering? We started down that road in Firefox 3 only to be rebuffed by luddites who claimed that it was far too important for CTRL-Tab and CTRL-Shift-Tab to behave as they've always done, as forward/back toggles.

Mike: that might help. I'd need to test MRU to see if it would confuse me :-) But also, often if you look through two or three tabs, you can't quite remember how far back to go. Maybe thumbnail Ctrl-tabbing (which seems to be on the agenda) would help. Also, note that my proposed key would work across windows, rather than within a single window.

Gerv, you can try it on Eclipse. When doing so, start your stop-watch to see in how many minutes you get lost. See this agitation against MRU. To be constructive, I'd suggest extending the keyhole button with a function that takes you back to last text-area you typed in. I believe Safari has it. Would be nice if it made it into 3.1.

You could try vimperator: - it supports "gi" (for go insert, just like vim) to jump to the last focused input field on the current tab. Adding a "gI" mapping to do that over tab boundaries would be quite easy, if there is really a demand.

@Mike
Ctrl+Tab is supposed to go to the Next Tab in any Tabbed Window on Windows (Try IE7 or one of the Control Panel applets)

I used MRU for a bit, but it seriously messed me up, and messes me up every time I use someone's computer with it on.

I use Tab Mix Plus with a setting of 'opener/right', which reverts to the tab that opened it, assuming that focus hasn't changed since, or the tab to the right.

Yeah, as for the MRU, Komodo Edit uses it. It's terrible, I can never figure out how to make it Just Work for switching across more than 1 tab.

I suppose the crucial difference with Alt+Tab is that the order in which the windows are listed in the small popup you see corresponds to the order in which you alt+tab through them, and for Komodo there is no window, and the behaviour does not correspond to the only ordering you can see - the tab bar.