This Shortcut Restores All Your Tabs If You Accidentally Close Your Browser
My job often requires me to switch from Windows to Mac and vice versa, meaning the differences between the two platforms are easy to confuse. For example, I keep forgetting that the close button works differently on the two platforms. On Mac the window is usually hidden . But on PC it gets rid of this completely. So, imagine my annoyance when I recently booted up my Windows computer and accidentally closed Firefox, which had 11 open tabs. Recovering these tabs was easy, if a little tedious, and I discovered a few useful techniques to speed up the process.
One keyboard shortcut to restore them all
The easiest and fastest way to restore tabs is with one keyboard shortcut . On Windows it’s Ctrl-Shift-T . On Mac it’s Command-Shift-T . If you’ve closed or logged out of your browser, you can open it again and use this shortcut to restore all your open tabs.
Recovering tabs with a few more clicks
If the shortcut doesn’t work, you can try an alternative tab recovery method. In Chrome (or any other Chromium browser), click the three dots icon in the top right corner and select History > X Tabs > Restore Window . In the History menu, you’ll see a submenu with the number of tabs you had open during your previous session. When you click on the menu, you have the option to restore them all.
In Firefox, you can click the button with three horizontal lines in the top right corner and go to History > Restore Previous Session to restore all your tabs.
Set up your browser to restore open tabs
The easiest way to restore tabs is to ask the browser to open previously closed tabs every time you launch it. In Chrome (and other Chromium browsers), you can do this by pasting chrome://settings/onStartup into the address bar, pressing Enter, and selecting Continue Where You Left Off .
Firefox uses a similar process. Open about:preferences#general in the address bar and check the “Open previous windows and tabs” checkbox under the “Startup” subheading.