The Reopening Annoyance
By default, when you launch Google Chrome, it might greet you with the exact same tabs you had open when you last closed the browser. While this “continue where you left off” feature is designed to prevent you from losing your work, it can be a massive privacy risk if you share a computer with others. Furthermore, if you regularly work with heavy web applications, loading twenty tabs simultaneously every single time you open the browser will cause severe performance lag and consume a massive amount of system memory before you even start browsing.
How to Change the Startup Behavior
You can easily instruct Google Chrome to start fresh with a clean slate (or a specific set of trusted pages) every time you launch the application.
1. Open Google Chrome.
2. Click the three vertical dots in the extreme top-right corner of the window.
3. Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
4. In the left-hand navigation sidebar, click on On startup.
5. In the main pane, you will see three radio button options. You likely currently have “Continue where you left off” selected.
6. To ensure Chrome starts with a clean slate, click the radio button next to Open the New Tab page.
With this setting applied, closing Chrome completely wipes the active session. The next time you open the browser, you will be greeted by a single, fast-loading New Tab page, protecting your privacy and ensuring maximum performance.
Alternative: Open Specific Pages
If you don’t want a blank slate, but rather a consistent starting point for your workday (like your email and a calendar), you can configure a custom startup set.
Select the third radio button, Open a specific page or set of pages. Click “Add a new page” and type the URL of your preferred start page. You can add as many pages as you like. Now, every time you open Chrome, it will ignore your last session and exclusively load the specific pages you designated.