Alt + tab no longer switches to last window in Windows 11

Which planning committee at Microsoft comes up with these genius ways to cause agony for users, pray tell. They have a special place in hell. They have adopted the worst customer UI approaches of Apple, of making random changes and forcing users to adapt every release. What happened to all the wise people at MS that created the most innovative and ubiquitous software known to humankind, why is the current lot creating the most thoughtless, head scratching, totally unintuitive changes to functionality instead of making it more user friendly.

Who ever approved this change is a mo ron. Stop meddling with things you dont understand and leave it up to people who actually do their jobs, because if you were doing a job, you know alt tab is suppose to work the way it was.

Hi all,

One of the most useful shortcuts I use all the time is not working for me on my new laptop with Windows 11. I used to use ALT + TAB to switch between the current window and the last window I used. Now if I use it it switches between the current window and the first open window (not the most recent). How can I get it so it switches between the two most recently used?

I have found a solution, press Win+R and write "regedit", then a window will appear. press ctrl+f and find "AltTabSettings". Change the value of AltTabSettings from 1 to 0,(1 means fast and 0 default) save it and then restart your computer. After that it will work just fine. It's for Windows 11. I hope this helps someone, I have had this problem for months and I am glad I found this solution.

I just stumbled onto something. I have two Lenovo laptops and one is docked using an external keyboard. On my laptop that's not docked, the Alt/Tab works as expected (bringing me back to previous window). Pressing the Tab/Windows keys opens up all open windows which is the same thing Tab/Alt does using the external keyboard (which does not have a Windows key).

Seems like there might be an issue with external keyboard layout assignments and Windows 11.

That's Microsoft for you. They did the same thing to Office. They didn't just remove critical features that actually kept people using Office instead of alternatives. You used to be able to link Excel workbooks into Word and data would be updated in the doc when you updated the worksheet. Now the embedded worksheets lose all formatting or are removed altogether. Months of runaround with techs. They acknowledged the issues, refused to fix them, and didn't bother removing them. I ended up with a free year of Office365, but issue still hasn't been resolved 4 years later.