How to close tabs without losing anything

You can close tabs without losing anything by saving them first in a way that's easy to bring back: bookmark them into a folder, add them to Chrome's reading list, save the whole group, or park them with a tool that reopens them later. And if you close something by accident, Ctrl+Shift+T (Cmd+Shift+T on a Mac) brings it straight back.

The reason we keep tabs open is fear of losing them. Remove that fear and closing becomes easy.

1. Bookmark into a folder

Best for: pages you'll need again, but not today.

Press Ctrl+D (Cmd+D on a Mac) and choose a folder named after the project. To save every tab in the window at once, press Ctrl+Shift+D and Chrome puts them all in a new folder.

2. Add to the reading list

Best for: articles you genuinely want to read.

Right-click the tab and choose Add tab to reading list. You'll find it in Chrome's side panel under Reading list, where read items are marked as you go. Keep it short; a reading list of 300 articles is just a tab pile in another place.

3. Save the whole group

Best for: a project you'll come back to next week.

If your tabs are in a tab group, recent versions of Chrome let you close the group and reopen it later from the saved groups in your bookmarks bar area or tab groups menu. Everything comes back together. Our Chrome tab groups guide shows how.

4. Park a category

Best for: tabs you'll want back in a few hours, like your social feeds during work.

Parking closes every tab in a category and remembers their addresses, so one click restores them. TabHue does this per category: hover a category and click park, then Restore to reopen them exactly as they were. Focus mode parks your distracting categories in one go. Pinned tabs are never parked, so anything you keep pinned stays put. With Pro, smart parking can park categories you haven't used for 30 minutes, an hour or three hours.

5. Snooze it until a set time

Best for: "I need this tomorrow morning."

In TabHue 2.0, arriving in December, you can snooze a tab until later today, this evening, tomorrow morning or next week. It closes now and reopens on its own, with a little note from your pet. Details will be in Tasks, reminders and snoozed tabs.

If you closed something by accident

• Ctrl+Shift+T reopens the last closed tab (or window). Press it again for the one before.
• Ctrl+H opens your history, where Recently closed lists whole windows and groups.

Frequently asked questions

Does closing tabs make Chrome faster?

Usually, yes. Each open tab uses memory, and some keep running scripts in the background. Closing or parking tabs you aren't using frees that memory; see how to save memory in Chrome.

Is it safe to close Chrome with lots of tabs open?

If Continue where you left off is on (Settings → On startup), Chrome reopens your tabs when you restart it. It's still worth saving important ones properly, because a crash or reset can lose them.

What's the difference between parking and bookmarking?

A bookmark is permanent and you decide where it goes. Parking is temporary: the tabs are put away as a set and come back together with one click, which suits "not now" rather than "keep forever".