Google Chrome has a built-in feature designed to help you recover from accidental crashes. It is called “Continue where you left off.” When enabled, Chrome remembers exactly which tabs you had open when you closed the browser. The next time you launch Chrome, it automatically reloads every single one of those previous tabs.
While this is useful for maintaining a persistent workflow, it can be incredibly frustrating if you intentionally close the browser to clear your workspace, only to have twenty heavy, resource-draining tabs instantly reopen the next day. It also poses a privacy risk if you share a computer and don’t want the next user to immediately see your previous browsing session.
How to Disable “Continue where you left off”
You can force Google Chrome to always open a clean, fresh New Tab page instead of reopening your old session.
- Open the Google Chrome browser.
- Click the three vertical dots in the top-right corner of the window.
- Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
- Look at the left-hand navigation sidebar and click on On startup.
- In the main window, you will see three radio button options controlling the browser’s startup behaviour.
- The middle option (“Continue where you left off”) is likely currently selected.
- Click the radio button next to Open the New Tab page instead.
The setting saves automatically; there is no “Save” or “Apply” button.
You can test it immediately. Open several random websites, then completely close the Google Chrome application. When you launch Chrome again, it will ignore the previous session entirely and present you with a single, clean, fast-loading Google search page.