How to restore your tabs after Chrome restarts or crashes

Updated 18 October 2026

If Chrome opened without your tabs, press Ctrl+Shift+T (Cmd+Shift+T on a Mac) to bring back your last window. To make Chrome reopen your tabs every time it starts, set On startup to Continue where you left off.

Get your tabs back now

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+T. Google's own crash guide recommends this after restarting Chrome, to reopen the tabs that were open before.
2. If the shortcut brings back the wrong thing, open the three-dot menu and point to History. Your old window is listed under Recent tabs as a count, such as 12 tabs. Point to it and click Restore window.
3. Still missing something? Press Ctrl+H (Cmd+Y on a Mac) and search the History page, which keeps 90 days.

Do this before you open and close other tabs. The shortcut always starts from whatever you closed most recently.

Make Chrome reopen your tabs every time

1. Open the three-dot menu and choose Settings, or paste chrome://settings/onStartup into the address bar.
2. Under On startup, choose Continue where you left off.

From now on Chrome reopens the windows and tabs you had open when you quit, tab groups included. Cookies are kept too, so you stay signed in to sites. The other two choices are Open the New Tab page and Open a specific page or set of pages, which opens the same fixed list every time.

After a crash

When Chrome shuts down unexpectedly, the next launch usually shows a Restore pages? prompt. Click Restore and your windows come back. If you dismissed it, use Ctrl+Shift+T or the History menu as above.

If crashes keep happening, Google's first suggestions are to close tabs you don't need, quit other apps, pause downloads and uninstall extensions you don't use. When the cause is memory, turning on Memory Saver at chrome://settings/performance also helps, because it puts tabs you aren't using to sleep.

After an update or a computer restart

When you click Relaunch to finish an update, Chrome saves your open windows and tabs and reopens them on its own. Incognito windows are the exception: they don't come back.

A computer restart closes Chrome along with everything else. If Chrome doesn't bring your tabs back when you open it again, press Ctrl+Shift+T straight away, and turn on Continue where you left off for next time.

Why Chrome didn't restore your tabs

• The startup setting. Only Continue where you left off reopens your last session. Check chrome://settings/onStartup.
• Windows you closed earlier. Chrome restores the windows that were open when it quit. A window you closed before that is in the History menu as a recently closed window.
• Incognito. Incognito windows never reopen, and their pages aren't saved in History.
• A different profile. Each Chrome profile keeps its own tabs, so check you opened the profile you were using.
• A work or school Chromebook. The administrator controls the startup pages, and you can't change them.

Save tabs before a restart

Continue where you left off remembers one session. For tabs you'd hate to lose, keep a copy as bookmarks: press Ctrl+Shift+D in each window to save every tab into a folder (more in how to save all open tabs). With Stackboard, Alt+Shift+S saves the window as bookmarks, one stack per tab group, and closes it. Any stack reopens later as a named tab group.

Firefox and Edge bring a session back with their own settings: see restoring tabs in Firefox and Edge.