Have you ever accidentally closed a tab, and had that quick pain of “why did I do that?” You wanted to look at that tab — maybe it was an important articles you wanted to read or some research that you needed to do for later. Either way, it was important to keep that tab open, and you accidentally closed it! Now the question is, how do you get that tab back? Well, it’s actually quite easy, especially if you’re running the Safari browser.
Restore Closed Tabs
Apple has built a really neat feature into Safari called Undo Close Tab, and they actually let you do this fairly quickly. First, you can access the closed tab from the Edit menu in the browser. Then, simply press the Undo Close Tab button. Alternatively, Safari offers a keyboard shortcut so you can get that closed tab really quick.
In Safari, with multiple tabs open, just press the command (⌘) Z button if you accidentally closed a tab. That’s the quickest way to restore a tab, but as a downside, this is Mac’s normal undo button, which is only able to hold one tab. It cannot remember multiple tabs, only the last one that you closed.
What about closed windows?
If you’re running Safari, you can easily open up windows that you’ve accidentally closed as well. It’s worth noting that it operates similarly to how Undo Close Tab works — Safari only keeps the last closed window available in its buffer, so you can’t undo multiple closed windows. On top of that, Safari does not offer a keyboard shortcut for opening up a closed window.
To open a closed window, open up the History section in Safari. From there you should see a option that says Reopen Last Closed Window. Click it and then closed window will open up!
What about Firefox and Chrome?
Unfortunately, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome don’t offer quick ways to reopen closed tabs and windows like this; however, you can open closed tabs by using your History. If you close a tab, simply open the History section of whatever browser you’re in, and click on the website that you closed.
If you’re in private browsing mode, this unfortunately won’t work since Firefox and Chrome don’t record your traffic here. But, if you’re browsing the Web normally, you should be able to access any closed tabs from your history.
Verdict
As you can see, it’s very easy to reopen a closed tab or window that you accidentally lost, at least if you’re in Safari. If you’re in any other browser, it’s a little more difficult, but not impossible, as we outlined above.