I have been deliberately preventing Chrome from updating so it wouldn’t add the AI features. When I need to free up memory or I’m ready to shut down or the computer, I’ll use Task Manager to do an end task on Chrome. Then when I need it again, it says it wasn’t shut down properly and gives an option to restore the windows. Works great and prevents the unwanted features.
This time, I slipped up. I was looking at the pop-up of the open Chrome windows you get when you move the mouse over the icon in the task bar. I accidentally clicked Close from there. The windows started closing one by one.
Okay. Shouldn’t be a big deal. Just run Chrome again so it will give me the restore session prompt.
It didn’t. Crap.
Go into the history. There I can see the list of windows I had. It’s shorter than what I had, but it’s something. Manually restore the first window. Good. Go back to the list. It’s the same number of windows, so it’s adding more to the list as earlier ones get restored. (I routinely have a lot of Chrome windows open with a lot of tabs when I’m doing research, which is constantly.)
I get a lot of the windows back, then notice others I’m trying to restore aren’t. They disappear and you can’t add them back to the list. I look through the summary of what’s in the remaining windows and decide what to let go and what I need to get back. Go into the sub-list of the window and click on Every. Single. Individual. Tab. One. At. A. Time. And wait as Chrome goes out and grabs the most current version of each page instead of displaying what’s in its cache.
Here’s what to avoid this problem if Chrome doesn’t give you a “restore session” open when it starts up.
- Go into the Menu > History > Recent tabs
- It will show a box with a darkened corner and the number of tabs it has in it.
- Move your mouse over the one you want.
- A sub-menu will appear all of the tabs for the window and a header that says “Restore window”.
- If the header has “Ctrl-Shift-T” to the right, that means the window can be fully restored with all tabs just by clicking on the header.
- If “Ctrl-Shift-T” is not there, do not click on the header. It will not “Restore window”. It will make that window disappear. You will have to manually restore every tab for that window.
Clicking on the tab that’s listed will add it to the currently-active Window. Drag the tab of of the window and drop it somewhere else on your desktop so it will become its own window. Then continue manually restoring the tabs.
Repeat with manually creating new windows and manually restoring individual tabs until you finish, give up, or decide you really need to get serious about having a “clean browser” policy.