Alt-Left potentially not as helpful as it could be?

I'm a bit of keyboard user (maybe its bacause I often use a laptop on the
train) - anyway I found that I REALLY like the fact that when you close a
tab, it goes back to the tab that you were previously looking at (not the
one next to it).

Unfortunately Alt-Left doesn't do this - it just moves you to next tab to
the left (which is ok - but I often find that I have a few tabs open:
package, system, and class, and then sometimes do References to operation
which will open a new tab at the end of the list. Having discovered
something useful I often want to go back to the previous tab I was coding
in, but leave the method browser open in case I want to refer to it again -
so I would like to do Alt-Left then do a bit more coding, and potentially do
Alt-Right to go and refer to an example some more).

It doesn't work like the above. I was hoping that maybe Ctrl-Tab would do
this - but I don't know what its doing...

I think the above is a more common scenario than moving strictly left and
right in sequential order - and judging by the close behavior - history is
stored in there.

What do others think - to you work this way?

Tim