IE 8 Reopen Closed Tabs

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In Internet Explorer 8, you might wonder how to reopen/restore your last browsing session – especially when you had multiple tabs opened.  In IE 7, when you closed the browser with multiple tabs, you’d get this window prompt:

IE7-Reopen-Tabs

This is very similar to what you currently see with Firefox’s solution when you close the browser with multiple tabs open:

Firefox-Reopen-Tabs

In IE 8, we do have a way to restore your last browsing session, but it is not intuitive.  When you close IE 8, you no longer get a similar prompt to what you see above.  Instead, you just see the following prompt:

IE8-close-all-tabs

After you close all tabs, and then re-open IE 8 you have to do two things to restore your last session. 

  1. Go to “about:tabs” in the browser address bar
  2. Click on the “Restore last browsing session” link

IE8-Reopen last Browsing Session

I’ve been asked this (or complained to about) this numerous times, so I thought I’d turn it into a blog post.  I’ve already submitted feedback to the product team that we should have a “smarter” default page (like about:tabs) and/or make the process to restore tabs more intuitive.