The Cluttered Startup
Google Chrome is designed to ensure you never lose your work. One of its core features is session management, which remembers the exact state of your browser when you close it. By default, or if the setting is accidentally toggled, Chrome may be configured to automatically reopen every single tab and window you had open during your previous session the next time you launch the browser. If you finished a heavy research session with forty tabs open, purposefully closed Chrome to clear your mind, and then reopened it the next morning only to be greeted by the exact same wall of forty tabs, the browser is hindering your workflow.
Configuring a Clean Slate
To ensure a fresh, uncluttered workspace every time you browse and stop Google Chrome from automatically reopening closed tabs on startup, you must change the browser’s fundamental startup behavior.
Open Google Chrome. Click the three vertical dots in the extreme top-right corner of the window (next to your profile icon) and select Settings from the dropdown menu. In the left-hand navigation pane, click on On startup. In the main window, you will see three distinct radio buttons governing how Chrome behaves when launched. If your tabs are reappearing, the button for “Continue where you left off” is likely selected. Change this selection by clicking the radio button next to Open the New Tab page. Alternatively, if you want Chrome to always open a specific website (like your company dashboard or a specific search engine), select Open a specific page or set of pages and enter the desired URL. From now on, closing Chrome permanently wipes the visual session, guaranteeing a clean slate upon the next launch.