How To Duplicate Tabs In IE And Chrome

Sometimes you may want to duplicate tabs (the page that you are viewing) into a New Tab – or even a New Window.

Of course you could just copy the website address, open a new tab (or browser window) and then paste the address into the address bar but that is so long winded – it also loses where you were in the page and the history of the page so you can’t page back or forward…

There are much better ways to duplicate tabs in IE and Chrome. Duplicating a tab keeps both the page history and your current location within the page. [Firefox users – see How To Duplicate Tabs in Firefox]

Duplicate Tabs In IE

A.  Duplicate into a new tab – Right click on the tab and select ‘Duplicate Tab’:

duplicate tabs in IE

Alternative 1. Use the hotkey shortcut – press CTRL+K at the same time

Alternative 2. From the Menu bar select ‘File’ then ‘Duplicate Tab’

Tip: if the Menu bar is hidden, press ALT to display it temporarily (to display it permanently, right click in the menu bar area and select/tick ‘Menu Bar’)

B.  Duplicate into a new IE window – From the Menu bar select ‘File’ then ‘New Window’ – see the tip above if the Menu bar is hidden.

Alternative 1. Use the hotkey shortcut – press CTRL+N at the same time

Duplicate Tabs In Chrome

A.  Duplicate into a new tab – Right click on the tab and select ‘Duplicate’:

duplicate tabs in chrome

B.  Duplicate into a new Chrome window – Right click on the tab and select ‘Duplicate’ to open a duplicate tab (same as in previous step).

Now that you have a duplicate tab, left click on the duplicate tab and (keeping the left button down) drag it down a bit (an inch should do).

The tab disappears from the tab bar and a dotted outline of the new window appears – now let go of the left mouse button and you will see that the duplicate tab has magically appeared as a new Chrome window in the taskbar.

Tip: you can use this same process of ‘drag and drop’ on any open tab if you want to move it to a new Chrome window instead of duplicating it (you can’t do this if you have only one open tab)

Conclusion

It is easy to duplicate tabs in IE and Chrome – into a new tab or a new window.

There are other manual methods and add-ons/extensions to do this but the above guides are the quickest and easiest methods, without having to install any extras.