Chrome lets you mass-restore all the tabs from an accidentally-closed window

Earlier today I accidentally closed a Chrome window with 97 tabs. I contemplated suicide—as I’m wont to do when this sort of thing happens—because I knew I was going to have to trudge through my history and restore, one by one, the tabs I could remember still being open (and which weren’t currently open in other windows). The process is a nightmare.

With my heart racing I clicked on the History menu item (not the full history dingus), looked under the Recently Closed section (which shows you your nine most-recently closed tabs) and just happened to notice a 97 tabs folder at the top of the list. I expanded that folder and at the top it said, Restore All Tabs. Boom. I was back to my previous state in about a minute. Brilliant.

It’s taken way too much time (like, uh, about a decade), but we’ve definitely come a long way from the days of me and others having to write the most insane AppleScripts, extensions, plugins, etc., to automate the restoration of browser sessions; these days browsers ship with the baked-in ability to restore not only sessions, but also windows within those sessions.

(It’s been a while since I’ve accidentally closed a browser window, and so I’ve no idea how long this feature has been in Chrome, but in any event, it’s fantastic and saved me a ton of time today. For kicks, I fired up Safari to see if it had something similar, and it does; choose History from the title bar and click on Reopen Last Closed Window.)