Twitter Bootstrap tab shown event not firing on page load

Try leaving the class active off both the tab <li> and the content <div>. One of the first lines of code in the show() method is to short-circuit if the tab being requested is already active.

JSFiddle

You can trigger the event manually when you tell the page to show the tab:

$('a[data-toggle="tab"]:first').trigger("shown.bs.tab");