Prevent Old Chrome Tabs from Opening at Startup

Having to deal with old Chrome tabs from a previous session can be annoying. You’d expect that when you open Chrome to get something done, you’d be looking at a new tab instead. If it happens once, fine, but every single time you open Chrome?

All hope is not lost since there are methods you can try to eliminate this problem. You will have to go into the browser’s settings, but it doesn’t involve anything complicated. Even if you’re not very tech-savvy, this will be easy to fix.

Prevent Chrome from Running in the Background

You’d think that when you close Chrome, it completely stops working. But, then, you see the notifications in the system tray even if it’s been a while since you’ve closed the browser. To prevent Chrome from running in the background go into Chromes settings and scroll all the way down until you see the Advanced option.

Click on it and look for the System section. The first option should be the one that allows you to prevent Chrome from running in the background. If this is what was causing the old tabs from appearing, you should now be free of the problem. Go ahead and restart Chrome to make the changes final.

Get Rid of the Continue Where You Left Off Feature

Continuing where you left off can be a handy feature since as the name indicates, you can pick things up where you left off. This saves you some valuable time, but it can also be the culprit of your problem.

To disable this feature, once again go into the browser’s settings. Once you’re in there, go to the section called On startup. See if the option that says Continue where you left off is selected, if it is, click on the option that says Open the New Tab page.

Disable That Experimental Feature: Fast Tab/Window Close Flag

The faster Chrome tabs close, the better since it’s time you can spend on more important things. Google knows that, and that’s why Chrome has a feature called Fast Tab/Windows Close Flag that does just that (close the tabs faster).

This feature does have its dark side, and that is that if the tabs haven’t been cleared out of Chrome’s cache, they can come up when you first launch the browser. Since the feature is turned on by default, you’ll need to go into the Flags section of the browser to turn it off.

Type chrome://flags/#enable-fast-unload into the URL bar. Don’t forget to hit enter. Don’t worry about trying to find the option since it’s going to be the first one you see and it’s also going to be highlighted in yellow. If this is the problem, then the drop-down menu is going to be set to enabled. Click, on the menu and simply select disabled.

Start from Scratch

Sometimes it can be difficult to pinpoint what is causing the problem. When that happens, the best thing you can do is reset Chrome. This is a lot easier than it sounds since you only need to first, go to Chrome’s settings.

Then, scroll all the way down and click on the advanced option. Click on the arrow pointing to the right, and you’ll see a message that will tell you what resetting Chrome will do. If you’re sure. Click on reset, and you’re good to go.

Conclusion

Those tabs can really be annoying, especially if they are tabs that you don’t need anymore. Hopefully, you were able to get rid of the problem with the first method, if not, the ones the followed should have done the trick. Did I miss a technique you use? If so, leave a comment and share it with us.