If you’re like most Chrome users, you probably rely on the re-open last session button to restore tabs when you lose your work in Chrome. Unfortunately, if you’ve been using Chrome for a while and your computer crashes, there’s a good chance that the last session is lost and no re-open last session button will help. In this article, we’ll show you how to restore tabs using other methods if the re-open last session button isn’t available. ..


Google Chrome, or your computer, crashed. All your tabs are gone, and what’s worse, there’s no button offering to “Re-open Last Session” when you reload Chrome. Maybe you missed it? Or maybe it was never there. Either way, you’d really like to get those tabs back.

And you can! Click the three vertical dot button to the right of your address bar.

You will see a menu item called “History,” with an arrow next to it. Hover over this with your cursor and you will see your recent history.

If your browser closed or crashed recently, you should see an item called, for example, “3 tabs.” Click that and your entire collection of tabs will be restored.

If you only care about a few tabs that were open, you can hover over “3 tabs” to see a list of the tabs that were closed.

If this doesn’t work, you can try a keyboard shortcut. Press Control+Shift+T (or Command+Shift+T if you’re using a Mac) and your most recently closed tab or window will re-open. Keep doing this until your window from earlier re-spawns, or the shortcut stops working.

There’s a chance your window won’t come back, however, particularly if you’ve been using your browser a bit since the crash. If that’s the case, click the “History” option at the top of that menu, or press Control+H on your keyboard (Mac: Command+Y).

Sadly, you will not find “bundles” of tabs here the way you did in the menu we pointed out earlier. But if there’s a specific tab you lost, you can find it by scrolling or searching. It’s not perfect, but at least there’s some record of those tabs you lost.

RELATED: How to Enable Private Browsing on Any Web Browser

Note that any tabs opened in a Private Browsing tab cannot be recovered using your browsing history. They’re gone forever (which is kind of the point of Private Browsing.)