TabsafeHow to find a tab you closed days ago
Search your browser history. Press Ctrl+H, type a word from the page title or the site name, and the page is probably listed under the day you visited it. Ctrl+Shift+T only helps with tabs you closed recently. For anything older, history is the built-in way, and a closed-tab log in an add-on is the second.
Using the browser
- Open history. Press Ctrl+H (Cmd+Y on a Mac in Chrome), or type
chrome://historyoredge://historyin the address bar. - Search by a word you remember. The search box looks at page titles and addresses. A site name works, and so does a unique word from the title. Several short searches beat one long one.
- Scroll by day. If you remember roughly when you saw it, scroll to that day. Pages are listed in the order you visited them.
- Try the address bar. Typing a word there suggests pages you have visited before. It is fast when you remember a site but not the exact page.
- Check other devices. If sync is on, the history page also lists tabs from your other computers and your phone.
This fails in three situations. You cleared your browsing data. You were in a private window. Or the page changed its title since you saw it, so the words you remember no longer match. History also lists visits one by one, so a page you opened fifty times shows up fifty times.
Using a closed-tab log
Tabsafe logs each tab when you close it, with its title, address, and when it closed. It also keeps snapshots of your open windows. The search box in its popup and side panel searches both at once. Type one or more words, and each word has to appear in the title or the address. Each address appears once, as its newest hit, newest first. Press Restore next to a result to open it again.
The free plan searches the last 14 days. Pro searches 365 days, so a tab you closed in the spring is still findable. New installs get 7 days of Pro, with no card. Pro costs €12 for a year or €29 once, as one-time passes that do not renew.
A snapshot is saved after every change to your windows. After the first day the older ones are thinned to one per hour, which does not matter for finding a page, since the search shows each address once.
What it cannot find
- Anything you closed before you installed it. The log starts on the day of installation.
- Words inside the page. Tabsafe searches titles and addresses only, not the text of the page.
- Private windows. They are never recorded.
- Pages older than your plan's window. Under the free plan, tabs past 14 days are not shown. On a later upgrade, the stored history returns.
Tabsafe runs in Microsoft Edge and Firefox on desktop. It is not offered for Chrome, so in Chrome the history steps above are the route.
A habit that helps
If a tab matters, give it a name. In Tabsafe you can save the open windows as a named session, and named sessions are never pruned. The free plan keeps five of them. Pro has no limit and adds folders.
Questions
- How do I search my history for a closed tab?
- Press Ctrl+H, or open chrome://history, and type a word from the page title or the site name into the search box. Pages are listed by the day you visited them.
- How far back can Tabsafe find a closed tab?
- The free plan searches 14 days of snapshots and closed tabs. Pro searches 365 days.
- Does Tabsafe search the text inside pages?
- No. It searches the titles and web addresses of tabs, not the text of the pages.
- Will Tabsafe find tabs I closed before installing it?
- No. It starts recording when you install it.
Keep a way back for your tabs
Tabsafe is free, with no account. It saves your windows as you work and logs the tabs you close.
Tabsafe runs in Microsoft Edge and Firefox on desktop. It is not offered for Chrome. Tabsafe is an independent product.