Selectively Reopen Closed Chrome Tabs Beyond Default Limit Of 10
Google Chrome is known not only for being simple, fast and lightweight, and supporting the latest web standards, but also for its several decent features that come built-in, such as letting you easily restore or reopen recently closed tabs. If you are one of those people who work with many tabs open, you would likely be aware of the importance of the tab restore feature. For instance, sometimes when you accidently close one or more tabs the restore function allows you to get back up to 10 of your last closed browser tabs with ease. Although very useful, this option is quite unintuitive for a couple of reasons. Not only are you limited to 10 tabs max for restoration, but you also don’t get any option to open a specific tab from the recently closed ones without having to go through them in chronological order. Closed Tabs is a small extension for Chrome designed to take care of these limitations.
The default tab restore function of Chrome allows you to reopen the last tab via right-clicking anywhere on the title bar or on any of the open tabs, followed by selecting ‘Reopen closed tab’ from the context menu. You can also alternatively press Ctrl+Shift+T on your keyboard for the purpose. However, as you can see in the screenshot below, there’s no option to reopen a specific tab only. Sure, you can easily jump to the History window and reopen a previously closed website or webpage from there, but this doesn’t sound intuitive and user-friendly at all, not to mention it’s fairly timewasting. It’s also worth mentioning here that this restore feature also needs to be enabled from Chrome’s Settings.
Closed Tabs tries to change the game by creating a tabs icon near the address bar. It’s instantly obvious that clicking this button is far more convenient than having to dig through the browser’s history, though the convenience doesn’t just end there. Clicking this button opens up the list of your recently closed tabs, from where you can reopen any of them with a single click – no more having to reopen the last three closed tabs first when you only want to reopen the fourth-last one. The extension also displays the total count of tabs they you’ve closed so far, and the interesting bit is that there’s no 10 tabs limit either for reopening. Closed Tab also allows you to clear this list if you want.
Overall, it’s a pretty handy Chrome extension that greatly augments a very useful yet limited functionality of Chrome. Closed Tabs can be installed for free via the following link.
Install Closed Tabs from Chrome Web Store
I dunno about anyone else, but I don’t find jumping to the history, and simply finding that which I accidentally closed, to be such a problem. Moreover, while this Chrome extension seems perfectly fine and nice, it becomes just one more icon to the right of the combobox…
…and I’ve already got enough of those that if I didn’t hide a few that I don’t need (because, for example, I only use them from the right-click menu) the combobox (or “Address:” field) in my browser would only be an inch wide.
Don’t get me wrong, this seems like a cool Chrome extension; but I’m just wondering if it’s really necessary, given that it’s all right there in the history, accessible via a simple [Ctrl-H] keystroke combination. And the real estate to the right of the combobox is already precious.
[shrug] I dunno… maybe I’m not lookin’ at it right or somethin’. But I’m just sayin’.
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Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
gregg at greggdeselms dot com
I recommend another useful extension of this sort – “Sexy Undo Close Tab” – works OK 🙂
Interesting name.