How to save all your tabs in Brave and keep them after closing

Updated 18 October 2026

Press Ctrl+Shift+D (Cmd+Shift+D on a Mac) and Brave saves every tab in the window as bookmarks in a new folder. To keep your tabs when Brave closes, leave On startup set to Continue where you left off, which is Brave’s default.

Bookmark all tabs in one go

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+D. With the mouse, right-click any tab and choose Bookmark all tabs, an item Brave adds to the tab menu, or right-click an empty part of the tab strip and pick the same item.
2. Type a name for the folder and choose where it goes, such as the bookmarks bar.
3. Click Save. The tabs stay open.

Brave shares this code with Chrome. The folder gets every tab in the window, whichever ones are selected, and each tab group becomes a subfolder with the group’s name. The command needs at least two tabs; for a single tab, press Ctrl+D.

To reopen them: right-click the folder on the bookmarks bar or in the Bookmark Manager (Ctrl+Shift+O, or Cmd+Option+B on a Mac) and choose Open all, Open all in new window or Open all in new tab group.

Tabs spread over several windows

Bookmark all tabs works one window at a time, so merge the windows first. Right-click a tab and choose Bring all tabs to this window: the tabs from your other Brave windows move into this one, and a single Ctrl+Shift+D saves the lot. The item shows up while another Brave window is open, and it leaves private windows and other profiles alone.

Keep your tabs when Brave closes

1. Go to brave://settings/getStarted, or open the menu and choose Settings.
2. Under On startup, pick Continue where you left off.

Brave’s source code makes this the default, so unless the setting was changed, the windows and tabs you had open come back at the next launch, tab groups included. To open one fixed set at every launch, choose Open a specific page or set of pages and click Use current pages to copy in your open tabs.

Tabs didn’t come back?

• Press Ctrl+Shift+T right away. Brave’s reopen list survives a restart, and after a crash it also holds the windows that were open, so the shortcut can bring the old window back.
• A window you closed before quitting isn’t part of the session. The History submenu in Brave’s main menu lists recently closed windows.
• Private windows never reopen (see below).
• Another profile. Each Brave profile keeps its own session.

With Brave Sync’s Open Tabs option on, the tabs open on your other synced devices are listed at brave://history/syncedTabs.

Tab groups

Brave uses Chrome’s saved tab groups, which keep every group you make. Right-click a tab and choose Add tab to new group to start one. When you’re done with it, right-click the group’s name and choose Close group: the tabs close and the group stays saved. Delete group removes it.

Brave’s main menu has no Tab groups entry (its code removes the one Chrome has), so closed groups come back from the bookmarks bar, where a tab groups button lists them. Show the bar with Ctrl+Shift+B (more on the bar), and if the groups still don’t appear, turn on Show tab groups in bookmarks bar at brave://settings/appearance. For a separate copy, Bookmark all tabs saves each group as a subfolder, and Open all in new tab group rebuilds it.

Private tabs

Brave forgets a private window once you close it: history, cookies and site data from it aren’t kept, and startup restore covers regular windows only. Bookmarks are the exception. Brave’s help says bookmarks saved in a private window are kept for regular windows too, so press Ctrl+Shift+D inside the private window before you close it.

On iPhone and iPad

Long-press the tabs button and choose Add Bookmark for N Tabs, which appears once two or more tabs are open. Brave suggests a new folder named Saved Tabs holding the tabs of the mode you’re in, private or regular; rename it if you like and save. Brave on iPhone and iPad can also keep private tabs when you quit the app: open the menu, then All Settings, and look in the Tabs section for Keep Private Tabs. Brave’s help adds that you can require Face ID to open them.

Save and close in one step

To save and clear a window in one go, Stackboard, a free new tab extension that runs in Brave, adds a stash: press Alt+Shift+S, or click its toolbar icon and choose Stash this window. Every tab goes into a Stash space as bookmarks, one stack per tab group plus one for loose tabs, then the tabs close (the popup also has Save only). Pinned tabs and browser pages stay open. Tab bankruptcy does this for every window at once, and any stack reopens as a named tab group in one click. It’s all stored as ordinary Brave bookmarks.