Where did the ‘Reopen Closed Tab’ button go in Google Chrome?

If you’re like me, you’re a serial user of the “Reopen Closed Tab” option in Google Chrome. Whether it be close-tab-happy-fingers or just carelessness, I find myself constantly needing to reopen closed tabs. It was so part of my daily Chrome routine that one recent change was a bit jarring for me — Google decided to move this option.

In a recent Google Chrome stable update, Google decided to move this major functionality. It used to be that you could right click anywhere in the tab pane at the top of the Chrome browser — even on a currently open tab — and you could choose to “Reopen Closed Tab”. Now, though, Google has made it so that the menu options when right-clicking a tab only have to do with that tab. You must right-click the tab pane itself to reopen a tab. CMD-Shift-T and CTRL-Shift-T also work, as they always have.

You can see in the screenshot at the top of this post how this feature used to appear in Chrome. The below screenshot represents the new location for this option…

In one sense, this change makes sense. If you’re right-clicking a tab, the context menu should represent that tab. But it’s also a functionality that has lived in that context menu for a very long time, and one that many Chrome users have gotten used to.

Additionally, my issue — and often the reason I’m going all-out closing tons of excess tabs that then need to be reopened — is having too many tabs open. So for me, I rarely have any room to right-click the main tab pane… it’s filled with a dozen or more tabs. In my case, I’m having to learn to right-click a small open space on the top area rather than just a random tab to reopen an accidentally closed one.

At first, I found this change really frustrating — I thought Google removed this option completely and left me dependent on a keyboard shortcut of the History section of the main Chrome menu to find recently closed tabs. Thankfully, that’s not the case; this is just a practical change that will require a little relearning!