A number of reasons may lead to Google Chrome closing unexpectedly. You might accidentally click the wrong pixel and the tab you needed disappears without warning. Or, to no fault of your own, Chrome decides to crash on you for no apparent reason.

The good part about Google Chrome is it remembers all the recent and even past web page browsing history, and regardless of what went wrong, you should be able to fully recover. However, in that regard, there are a few ways you can easily restore closed tabs in Chrome if this ever happens to you.

Chrome decided to move the Reopen Closed tab feature in 2019 when it rolled out the Chrome 78 update, and people used to it have recently been worried if it got removed altogether, yet it was a really handy feature. And yes, the feature is still there.

From the Tab Bar

The best part is, it is still easy to access if you know where to look. To reopen a closed tab(s), just right-click on an empty space in the tab bar and select “Reopen Closed Tab”.

The “Reopen Closed Window” option might come back if you recently close the window instead of a tab(s).

It needs to be noted that Chrome reopens tabs in chronological order, starting with the last tab closed in the browser.

As mentioned, you can reopen the closed tab feature to reopen a closed window. Chrome seems to mix tabs and windows together here so that you can use the reopen closed tab until the window opens again that you closed earlier. Keep in mind that Chrome displays “reopen closed tab” or “reopen closed window” in the context menu, but not both options at the same time.

This will open the most recently closed tab. Repeat this process to reopen tabs in the order they were closed, going back through your history.

With the previous Chrome versions, simply right-clicking an active tab on Chrome’s tab bar brought up the “Reopen Closed Tab” with other options which still remained there. That option now required right-clicking on an empty space to find it.

If you haven’t turned on the right-clicking option on a Mac, press and hold down the Ctrl key and click instead of right-clicking. This will bring up the drop-down menu together with other major options in the list. Press the shortcut repeatedly to reopen closed tabs in the order they were closed.

Using the Keyboard Shortcut

You can also press Ctrl+Shift+T on Windows or Cmd+Shift+T on Mac to reopen a closed tab using the keyboard shortcut. If you recently closed a window, this will reopen the closed window instead, also.

How to Reopen a Specific Closed Tab

Chrome also offers a menu that lists all the recently closed windows and tabs it’s keeping track of. To access it, click Chrome’s menu and point to History.

Under Recently Closed, you’ll see a list of recently closed windows and tabs. Click the one you are looking for to reopen it.

Clicking the history option will take you to the recently closed window or tabs. If you still don’t see the web page you want to recover yet, click the history submenu item (chrome menu > history > history). Or, you can use the shortcut Ctrl+H. On a Mac pc, use the Command+Y to do the same thing.

Chrome doesn’t provide a way to restore closed windows in Chrome if the closed window no longer displays under Recently Closed in the History menu. In that case, the option will be to go through history to open tabs instead that were displayed in that closed browser window.

To view a full history of the web pages you visited, tap on the History option, and you should be able to find the page you wanted there. You can even search your web page history to make it easy if it has been a while since you closed or lost your tab.

Individual tabs are listed with the page title and windows with the number of tabs that they contain. A click will reopen the listed tab or window in the Chrome browser.

With this method also, you can still recover your pinned tabs if they are gone. They’re likely still available in your history, so you could reopen them and re-pin them again.

Enable setting to restore Google Chrome tabs after restart

If you’re looking for a way to restore all tabs when Chrome restarts, it’s easy:

• Open the Chrome menu and click on the 3-dot menu in the upper-right corner of Chrome
• Tap on the Settings
• Scroll to the “On Startup section” found at the bottom of the page
• Click to enable the setting, Continue where you left off option.

Now, whenever you close and restart Chrome, any window(s) and tab(s) you had visited previously will be automatically reopened.

If all those steps didn’t work, you can start using a reliable tab manager to save your tabs. This won’t bring back your already closed tabs, but it will make sure you don’t lose important tabs in the future.

Conclusion

With the Reopen Closed Tab feature, you won’t get to reopen windows or tabs that were opened in Chrome’s Incognito Mode. This is how private tabs and windows are programmed because of privacy. Chrome normally forgets about the private tabs as soon as they are close.

This removal of Reopen Closed Tab from its previous place, according to the Chrome team, is that they’re trying to make things more coherent:

“New Tab, Reopen Closed Tab, and Bookmark All Tabs are ‘tabstrip context’ rather than ‘tab context’ and feel conceptually strange when you right-click a single tab. The window frame context menu, which is our closest substitute for a tabstrip context menu, is a more appropriate place (and two of these three already exist there)“.

A note to consider always is to bookmark web pages that you visit regularly by clicking the ⭐️ icon found on the right side of the address bar.

This automatically adds a button to the Chrome browser — clicking this button will redirect the current tab to the desired web page.

The above features and methods will certainly make it hassle-free when you are re-opening your recently closed tabs in Chrome. You’ll no longer have to head into various Chrome options to find and restore your closed tabs; finding all those tabs is just with a single click.