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How to Restore Closed Tabs in Chrome

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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.

How to Reopen Closed Tabs in Chrome

Note: If you are looking for chrome-native://recent-tabs, this page no longer exists. You can see a list of all available chrome:// URLs here: chrome://chrome-urls/

Restore Closed Tabs

To gets your tabs back:

  1. Click Settings (three dots icon next to your profile picture).Chome Three Dots Settings Icon
  2. Click History.
    Chrome History in Menu
  3. Click the site that you want to reopen.
Reopen a Chrome Tab
Reopen a Chrome 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 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. This allows you to get your tabs back.

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

Restoring Chrome Tab Groups

Google Chrome allows you to group tabs and manage them in groups. You can reopen a closed tab group to reopen all of them together.

If the last item you closed is a tab group, you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + T to reopen the tab group.

For other recently closed tab groups:

  1. From the three-dots settings menu, select History.
  2. Now select Recently Closed.
  3. Find your tab group and select Restore Group
Reopen Closed Chrome Tab Groups

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

Dinsan

Content Developer and Digital Minimalist. I love testing new Chromebook features and writing about them. My favorite Chrome OS Channel is Canary. | Twitter

  1. chrome story Avatar
    chrome story

    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 Avatar
    na5m

    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 Avatar
    chrome story

    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 Avatar
    MAQ

    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 Avatar
    Pasquale

    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 Avatar
    Pasquale

    Never mind, I fixed it.

    Reply
  7. chrome story Avatar
    chrome story

    @ Ali

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

    Reply
  8. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    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
    1. chrome story Avatar
      chrome story

      you are welcome !

      Reply
  9. N/A Avatar
    N/A

    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 Avatar
    Ex-Chrome User

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

    Reply
    1. Dinu Avatar
      Dinu

      well, in my experience, it does..

      Reply
  11. Aigars Avatar
    Aigars

    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 Avatar
    kendal

    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 Avatar
    Laurent

    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 Avatar
    Sorin Acela

    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 Avatar
    Laurent

    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 Avatar
    Zac Helmberger

    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 Avatar
    dada

    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 Avatar
    Antonio

    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 Avatar
    colin

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

    Reply

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