The Cluttered Startup
Google Chrome offers a feature designed for users who need to pick up exactly where they left off. If you have 20 tabs open for a research project and you close the browser, Chrome can be configured to automatically reopen all 20 of those tabs the next time you launch the application. This is called restoring the “Last Session.” However, if you prefer a clean slate, or if you share a computer with someone else and do not want them seeing the dozen Amazon tabs you had open when you closed the browser, this automatic restoration is a massive privacy and performance issue.
Forcing a Clean Slate
To ensure you always start fresh and stop Google Chrome from automatically opening your previous tabs from the last session upon startup, you must change the “On startup” behavior in the settings.
Open Google Chrome. Click the three vertical dots in the top-right corner of the window and select Settings. In the left-hand navigation sidebar, click on On startup. In the main panel, you will see three distinct radio buttons. If Chrome is opening old tabs, the option “Continue where you left off” is currently selected. To stop this behavior, click the radio button next to Open the New Tab page. Alternatively, if you want Chrome to always load a specific website (like your company intranet or a specific news site) every time it launches, select Open a specific page or set of pages and enter the URL. Regardless of which of those two options you choose, Chrome will never again automatically resurrect the tabs from your previous browsing session.