Is Chrome’s Reopen Closed Tab Gone?

If “Reopen Closed Tab” has disappeared from your Chrome browser, you’re not alone — a number of posts on Facebook and Twitter appeared as people saw the function began vanishing from their drop-down menus:

“Restore Closed Tab” (or “reload” or “reopen”) was an option on Chrome which appeared if users right-clicked any tab. One of its primary uses was the event of accidentally closing a tab by mis-clicking the “X” to close when trying to toggle to another tab, or accidentally engaging the keyboard functions (Ctrl+W) and closing an active tab.

A handful of complaints appeared in August 2019, but in November 2019, far more began asking others what happened to “Restore Closed Tab” on Chrome. In late October 2019, a post to Reddit’s r/chrome queried:

Overall, users expressed a hamstrung feeling without the function:

Some Chrome users indicated they’d been using the “Recently Closed” portion of “History” to restore tabs they’d closed. On October 28 2019, a user posted to support.google.com to ask about “Restore Closed Tab.” Along with a screenshot of the right-click-drop-down menu, the user stated “Restore Closed Tab” disappeared from their installation of Chrome on or around October 26 2019:

What happened to the ability to right-click an open tab at the top of the page and select ‘Restore Closed Tab’? It disappeared 2 or 3 days ago (see attached image); now I have to SHFT-CTRL-T to reopen accidentally-closed tabs, which is a whole lot more trouble than right-click-reopen.

In the next visible response, a user tagged “Gold Product Expert” responded, noting that “Restore Closed Tab” had not been completely removed from Chrome:

Hello everyone, welcome to Google Chrome Help Community!

The option “Restore closed tabs” was not removed from Chrome but was changed from local.

You can right click at any empty spot on the tab pane and it appears, be it around the plus sign or the space left to pinned tabs.

Please, check this: Where is reopen closed tab?

That commenter added the screenshot above, depicting a new placement of the “Reopen Closed Tab” function. As they noted, “Reopen Closed Tab” function was indeed missing — but only from its normal home in the right-click tab dropdown menu. Clicking an empty spot on the tab pane revealed the new location of the option to restore a closed tab for Chrome users.