• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

Chrome Story

Chromebooks and Chrome OS Made Simple

  • Chromebook
  • Chrome
  • Chromecast
  • Assistant
  • Videos
Home / Google Chrome / How to Restore Tabs On Google Chrome

How to Restore Tabs On Google Chrome

May 27, 2009 by Dinsan Francis Updated on: 2:15 pm 21 Comments

Contents

  • 1 Restore Closed Tabs
  • 2 Restore Chrome Tabs After Crash
  • 3 Continue where you left off
    • 3.1 Related

This article explains how to restore closed Chrome and Chromebook tabs and also how to restore a browsing session after a crash. We will start by restarting a closed tab and move on to keyboard shortcuts and more.

Restore Closed Tabs

To restore a recently closed Chrome tab:

  1. Click Settings (three dots icon next to your profile picture).
  2. Click History.
  3. Click the site that you want to reopen.
reopen tab

You can, however, do this quickly using a keyboard shortcut. Press CTRL + SHIFT + T to reopen the last tab that you closed.

Press the the same keyboard combination again to open the tab before that. You can do this up to the last nine tabs. This keyboard shortcut works on all platforms including Windows 10, macOS, (Replace CTRL with CMD) Chromebooks, and Linux.

You can also right-click on the Chrome toolbar area outside the row of tabs and choose “Reopen closed tab”.

reopen closed tab

You can also open the history page (CTRL + H or CMD + Y on macOS) and open any tab from there. You also have the option to search for specific websites.

Restore Chrome Tabs After Crash

When Chrome restarts after a crash, you will see an option to restore all tabs from the previous session. Click Restore to reopen all those tabs.

restore tabs after crash

Continue where you left off

Another option is to enable “Continue where you left off” in settings. With this enabled, Chrome will reopen all the tabs from your last browsing session every time you open the browser. To enable this:

  1. Open a new tab and go to chrome://settings.
  2. Under “On startup” select the radio button that says “Continue where you left off“
continue where you left off

Questions on restoring closed Chrome tabs? Let us know in the comments section and we will update the article with additional information.

  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Twitter
  • WhatsApp
  • Pocket
  • Telegram

Related

Filed Under: Google Chrome

About Dinsan Francis

Content Developer and Digital Minimalist. Loves testing new Chromebook features and writing about them. Favorite Chrome OS Channel is Canary. | Twitter

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Updates via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 4,032 other subscribers

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. chrome story says

    June 16, 2009 at 2:55 pm

    you can uninstall using control panel if you are using Windows .. please specify your OS .. or post this question on our forum 🙂 chromestory.com/forum

    Reply
  2. na5m says

    August 16, 2009 at 12:44 am

    i was soooo frustrated with Chrome for closing my tabs without warning. but this video has helped. now i know how to restore past browsing sessions. However, overall, it is still way too disruptive to restore rather than simply deal with a “Close Multiple Tabs?” confirmation dialog box. For instance, what if you were in the middle of a financial transaction (purchasing with credit card or transferring bank funds)? Or in a chat room? etc…. Even though you’ve restored your sessions, you are now unsure of what state the transactions are in that you were working on.

    Reply
  3. chrome story says

    August 16, 2009 at 3:22 am

    Yes, I also think the same way .. this also happens when you are watching a movie online, streaming video .. you loose everything that you were doing ..

    Reply
  4. MAQ says

    January 7, 2010 at 8:28 pm

    how stupid this guy is saying in the video that our designers dont want to disturb the users by giving warnings … true! …. a lot of users dont like to get that warning but at the same time so many users would prefer to get this warning …. I can not possibly imagine how hard could it be for chrome designers to add a feature, where users can select in “Options” menu if they want this warning or not

    Reply
  5. Pasquale says

    February 9, 2010 at 8:34 pm

    I have a different problem. Even if I have closed all tabs, when I restart Chrome, it opens the tabs from several days ago.

    Reply
  6. Pasquale says

    February 9, 2010 at 8:40 pm

    Never mind, I fixed it.

    Reply
  7. chrome story says

    February 19, 2010 at 6:26 am

    @ Ali

    thanks for sharing .. I was wondering if there is any native extension, other than greasemonkey

    Reply
  8. Anonymous says

    August 13, 2010 at 11:23 pm

    Thank you for the Control+Shift+T solution! I had closed a huge multi-tab Chrome window, but one single separate (individual) window was still open, so when reopening Chrome I lost all my tabs. This easy shortcut (pressed a couple of times) brought them all back!!!

    Reply
    • chrome story says

      August 13, 2010 at 11:30 pm

      you are welcome !

      Reply
  9. N/A says

    September 21, 2010 at 2:50 am

    So you clicked on the TOOLS menu, then what did you select, you didnt say.

    Btw, I have a Mac (Snow Leopard) and im using Chrome 5.0.375.70 beta.

    So I see the TOOL, but I can’t find the rest of what you did/showed.

    Thanks

    Reply
  10. Ex-Chrome User says

    September 21, 2011 at 1:08 pm

    I would say Chrome sucks! It doesn’t restore crashed session!

    Reply
    • Dinu says

      September 21, 2011 at 3:49 pm

      well, in my experience, it does..

      Reply
  11. Aigars says

    February 4, 2012 at 2:42 am

    i’m kinda frustrated at chrome!
    What i usually have and am afraid of is that when i open two separate chrome window browsers (not tabs) and accidentally first close the one with a lot of tabs in it and then close the other one with only one tab – I can only restore the last browser tab opened! AND THAT MAKES ME ANGRY! just because i can’t see those closed tabs in history! they disappear and I can’t find where!!
    any help?

    Reply
  12. kendal says

    February 14, 2012 at 1:58 pm

    I had to restart my computer, and restart Chrome. At first it asked if I wanted to restore my last session. But Chrome crashed. I started it again. And I don’t see the option now. And I can’t find the Tools menu. I’m running version 17.0.963.46 on a Macbook Pro. I’d really like my tabs back today…. what do I do?

    Reply
  13. Laurent says

    March 10, 2012 at 4:29 am

    For today, I fear it’ll be too late… But you can take a look at your history (Ctl+H) and scroll back to the date you opened your tabs.

    This said, the guys @ Chrome seem to have disabled the aforementioned function (or, at least the ACCESS to this function) since dev-branch 17. Maybe a tweak/hack/extension out there?

    Reply
  14. Sorin Acela says

    March 24, 2012 at 12:39 pm

    That video is totally out of date. Due to bad designing, I was only lucky to find the newest way (GC v17) carefully hidden by the programmers. Open a new tab and you will see the RECENT CLOSED link, small, grey-on-grey, at the right of the lower bar of the window. Such a useful feature so badly taken care of. The newer generations of programmers and designer are so narrow-minded!

    Reply
  15. Laurent says

    March 24, 2012 at 8:28 pm

    I haven’t got such a link as you suggest, Sorin. Only “most visited” and “Apps”. And I’m on french Chromium v. 19 (19.0.1042.0 (Build de développement 121875 Windows). What do you have exactly next to your “grey on grey” link?

    Reply
  16. Zac Helmberger says

    December 17, 2012 at 8:45 am

    OMG THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! I realized the probelm was that I had the extension “New Tab Redirect” enabled and could not see the feature you were referring to. Miraculously, I was able to disable the extension without having to reboot! Now my session is RESTORED!! I clicked on the thingie at the top of the drop up menu for recently closed tabs that said “12 tabs” and all is well!

    Just make sure the “New Tab Redirect” extension is disabled in order to see this valuable feature!

    Reply
  17. dada says

    May 27, 2013 at 12:06 pm

    yours is the most helpful of all the articles I came across when I searched for help on how to reopen chrome tabs after I accidentally closed all of them! thank you so much!

    Reply
  18. Antonio says

    February 1, 2014 at 3:31 am

    After opening a gazillion webpages, my chrome browser crashed. Upon clicking the request to restore – I accidentally open Gmail in the same browser thus canceling the restore yellow tab on that webpage. Restarted my computer the restored requests was the longer available. How can I restore all those windows so I can complete what I was doing. I’m a graduate research student. I’m asking how to open all the windows that I Had prior to the crash & restarting the computer

    Reply
  19. colin says

    August 30, 2015 at 6:14 am

    I found it to be very good espeshally when u are computer illiterate.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

WordPress | Copyright © 2022 Chrome Story | Chrome is a registered trademark of Google Inc.

  • About
  • Privacy
  • YouTube