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I have two separate chrome windows, each window has multiple tabs in it.

I want to reopen both windows with associated tabs when I open Chrome.

What I have noticed is that if I close the first Window and then the second Window, chrome will restore the second window. So it will restore my session from the last closed window.

How should I close Chrome such that both windows close simultaneously so they are both restored?

5 Answers 5

103

When exiting Chrome, always use the Exit action from the menu.

Google Chrome More Options menu

This will close all windows and, given that you have Continue where I left off enabled in the options, all windows will be reopened when you start Chrome the next time.

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    I noticed within History that Chrome knows what tabs were open in which instances of Chrome on-close. It separates them with a | pipe char in a blank line. While Ctrl+Shift+Q is a handy shortcut, most people don't know about it. Therefore, if someone has Continue where I left off as their setting, I would argue that chrome should re-open those manually closed/killed instances the next time a new Chrome instance launches. It is a UX decision, not really a bug, where its utility benefits power users more than normal users, substantially. That's why I wish this was different... Apr 21, 2017 at 22:16
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    Beware that since Chrome version 79, this feature has become quite unstable. But make a mental note on the number of tabs in each window, and you can re-open the missing windows from "⋮ -> history -> recently closed". They have a folder-icon and the text "n tabs"
    – Superole
    Dec 17, 2019 at 9:21
  • I found myself here 2 weeks ago (evidenced through the edits) and ensured I had Continue where I left off enabled. It unchecked itself in the mean time. Be careful.
    – stevec
    Apr 26, 2020 at 23:45
  • it's not there anymore Dec 1, 2021 at 3:12
  • Hard to believe that after almost 10 years, this answer still solves the described issue. You would think Google would address it themselves.
    – Lee Fogel
    Jun 5, 2023 at 20:21
6

It doesn't matter how many windows and tabs you have opened of chrome, and when you close the recent most window is opened. To open all windows separately and all the tabs in order you can always use this ->whenever you close chrome and then reopen it go to wrenchbar icon and select Recent Tabs this will show you the windows and the no. of tabs opened in each window. So you can reopen them again.

Though when you exit from chrome and then open it, it opens all the tabs from all windows in the same window.

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    +1 for the "Recent Tabs" menu, though your first statement was wrong. If you exit Chrome as Oliver says, it does restore all open windows and tabs next time you open it.
    – elo80ka
    Aug 12, 2014 at 8:07
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    For one who did not close chrome via the "Exit" action – phew! – thank you this answer saved my day.
    – fredrik
    Sep 9, 2015 at 19:40
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    At the moment this functionality is found under "history" in the 3-dots menu (which was previously the wrench icon). There you see a link to the history page (ctrl-H) and your "Recently "closed tabs" (with a separate heading for tabs from other devices). In this list any window you closed also has an entry, titled "X tabs". Click that to restore the entire window. (chrome v55.0)
    – Ward D.S.
    Jan 11, 2017 at 8:23
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If you open up task manager and kill both the processes at the same time, when you go to open chrome again it will bring up all the tabs within both windows.

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I know this is old but I ran into an issue where I had multiple windows (5 open) in addition to my original session that I wanted to keep (it had a multitude of tabs within the window) and I didn't want to lose it. But silly me, accidentally closed them all in the wrong order losing my very first session. But I was able to recover my very first session by continually right clicking on a new tab to reopen sequences of previous session tabs and windows until it eventually went all the way to my very first session. *Btw, I'm using whatever latest version of Google Chrome as of June 8th, 2016.

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    I use ctrl-shift-T instead of right-clicking, and this worked wonders. I had exited chrome by logging off windows, and when it restarted, it only brought up 2 of my 3 windows. It was too late for the accepted solution here, and drilling through days of history sounded tedious, so I'm really glad this worked.
    – craq
    Apr 10, 2018 at 4:34
  • @craq the shortcut was the key. Thank you, if it would be an answer I would vote for it.
    – tukan
    Jul 24, 2019 at 11:47
  • @tukan it's effectively the same as this answer, just using the keyboard instead of the mouse. If friendly fire agrees, I could edit it into their answer?
    – craq
    Jul 24, 2019 at 22:59
-1

When you just re-opened the (recent version of) Chrome, there are marks of sort of "bunch of tabs" (with number of them bold font) visible in the history. Those refer to windows. The most recent actually refers to already open window, if selected the settings option "restore previous session" (nice joke from Chrome). But if you forgot to restore all the windows immediately after reopening Chrome and opened 1-3 new tabs, those "windows" get erased from the history (WHY THE HECK, GOOGLE?) and there is no way to recover. At least I still couldn't find any.
Funny thing is that if you decided to protect yourself and installed some special plugin to handle that, e.g. "tabs-outliner", it can restore the windows only when Chrome crashed. If the Chrome was closed gracefully, no history of those windows saved unless you deliberately renamed those beforehand to be firmly kept. But you cannot keep in mind all those tricks all the time and eventually get into those stupd UX bugs pitfalls!. Thank you, Google!

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