The work to immediately restore recently closed tabs in Chrome was began a year back. The much-awaited “Closed Tab Cache” feature can now be tested in the Chrome browser in Canary verison. Google warns the feature as “highly experimental and will lead to various breakages”, so don’t enable it right now unless you know what you’re doing.
What is Closed Tab Cache?
If you close a tab, Chrome generally closes the page, it may take more time for the page to fully load if you restore it by selecting the “Reopen closed Tab (Ctrl+Shift+T)” button in the tab bar right-click menu.
Instead of closing the page, Chrome may put contents of closed tabs in a special cache and makes them instantly available when you need them.
Google to use Back Forward Cache feature code for Closed Tab Cache.
In case you don’t know, Back Forward Cache is availble on desktop and Android, which makes back and forward navigation instantly.
Closed Tab Cache works similarly to Back Forward Cache.
According to the design document, Closed Tab Cache was already available for Chrome on Android.
How to test and enable Closed Tab Cache in Chrome
- Right now, the feature is available for testing in the Canary version 94.0.4606.0. To test it
- Launch Chrome
- Visit chrome://flags/#closed-tab-cache
- Select Enabled and restart the browser.
Chrome already opens recently closed Tabs in few seconds, you should expect the loading time to get even better when Google implements Closed Tab Cache for Chrome browser.
If you’re running a stable version, here are other ways to Reopen Closed Tabs in Chrome:
- Use the keyboard Shortcut Ctrl+Shift+T on Windows instead of the mouse
- Chrome also comes with a Tab Search feature that lists open and recently closed tabs.
Click on the Tab Search icon on the toolbar, click the item under Recently Closed tabs to restore. This procedure involves more clicks, but the feature lists all recently closed tabs and lets you open whichever you want from the menu
More on Chrome:
First look at Chrome’s Privacy Review feature
Google to make Chrome’s Keyword Search feature more discoverable and useful
