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Clearing the entire history of a computer is awfully suspicious. How do I clear only the "recently closed tabs"?

I've deleted the pages from History, but they still appear in recently closed, along with the "History" tab itself.

I need to clear "recently closed tabs."

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  • What if you "Clear browsing data..." > "the past week" > "Browsing history" - does that remove the "recently closed tabs"?
    – MrWhite
    Nov 28, 2015 at 10:11
  • Yes, it deletes them all, so it looks suspicious that the history is cleared when you just want to just remove the recent history. The "recently closed tabs" is now empty.
    – User
    Nov 28, 2015 at 16:37
  • An idea would be to open a number of inconspicuous tabs then close them, as to overwrite the previous "recently closed tabs" list.
    – Insane
    Nov 29, 2015 at 4:14

6 Answers 6

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You can simply quit and restart Chrome twice.

Tested on Mac; Chrome forgets every individually closed tab after I closed and re-opened it twice. The only thing left is the "# Tabs" submenu item.

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  • That doesn't work (anymore) on Windows. Tested with Google Chrome v94.
    – PeterCo
    Oct 1, 2021 at 14:02
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Do this:

  • CTRL-H;
  • Clear Browsing Data;
  • Select "the Past Hour" beside 'obliterate the following items from';

This will remove the recently closed as well as the history items.

Suggest leaving a few "legit" tabs open before you do the above procedure, and then close them afterward so it doesn't look suspicious.

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  • I was hoping it would refill it from history from before that deleted hour, instead of emptying it entirely.
    – User
    Feb 7, 2016 at 23:11
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the best way to do that is as follows:

1) check first what's on the list of "recently closed" tabs.

2) open each and every one of those previously closed tabs from the last one on the list to the first.

3) now ctrl+h (History) and then click on "Clear Browsing Data" (a new tab will open up).

4) close the 'History' tab you just came from (it should be on the left of where you are now). closing this tab first will prevent it to appear on the future list of 'recently closed' tabs.

5) now you should land back on the "clear your browsing history" tab. Select "from the past hour", check off "Browsing data" and click "Clear Browsing History" and close this tab.

6) Now you can carefully close again each tab you had re-opened in step 2 to 'simulate' they just had been recently closed and feed that list back to what it was when you found it. Make sure you close each tab in the same order they were originally on the list, meaning from left to right if you started re-opening them from bottom to top and from right to left if you started re-opening them from top to bottom of the list.

That's it, you're in the clear! Now your gf or bf's Chrome Browser looks exactly as s/he left it lol ;)

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  • 1
    Your explaining what other answer already provided
    – yass
    May 18, 2017 at 20:19
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2021-11-01

Regarding clearing Recent Tabs history in Chrome within the Windows 10 operating system.

The "twice exit" procedure no longer works in my version of Chrome.

The clearing method described below works in Chrome version 95.0.4638.69 (Official Build) (64-bit)

The Recent Tabs history data is located in the Sessions folder at C:\Users\YourUserID\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default.

With Chrome closed, deletion of the Sessions folder will clear Recent Tabs. A "clean" Sessions folder will automatically be recreated when Chrome is next opened.

There are a number of Chrome folders and files which can be safely deleted to clear contents and then automatically recreated "clean" when Chrome is reopened. The "History" file at C:\Users\YourUserID\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default is another example.

I use a batch file to automatically delete the Sessions folder, History file and others as part of a shutdown procedure.

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  • That worked! For me, deleting the file(s) Tabs_ in %localappdata%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Sessions was sufficient for Chrome v97.
    – PeterCo
    Jan 14, 2022 at 8:58
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Another approach:

  1. Open all the recently closed tabs you want to remove from the list.
  2. In each of the re-opened tabs type in any new legit web page addresses and open it.
  3. Close all those re-opened tabs.
  4. Clear that previously re-opened tabs from the history.

The previously opened tabs are replaced with the newly entered legit addresses thus the ones you wanted to remove are gone.

Hope this helps :-)

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When Chrome / Google will not delete recent tabs - Go to your Google account - Dashboard -activity and personaliztion - scroll down to chrome open tabs and at the bottom of the page reset.

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