Closing tabs in Chrome is getting much better on Android

Google Chrome on Android
(Image credit: Shutterstock - slyellow)

In a future release of Google's web browser on Android, you'll be able to avoid the mistake of closing all your tabs at once, thanks to an additional message box to confirm if you want to go ahead with it.

Google Chrome is the most widely-used web browser app on Android, mainly due to it being pre-installed on the majority of Android smartphones. But there may be an occasion when you've got multiple tabs open at once.

Some could be related to shopping, birthday ideas, or brainstorms for holidays in the summer for example. You may want to close all of these at once when you're finished.

In Chrome Canary, the test version of Google's web browser, you can enable a flag that will display a message box to confirm if you want to close all your tabs at once. This will help prevent occasions where you accidently close all the browser tabs when you didn't mean to.

How do you enable the message box confirmation?

By going to chrome://flags when running Google Chrome Canary 100 on Android, there will be a 'Close all tabs modal dialog' option.

Switching this on will make the message box appear when you're about to close all your tabs.

This can be useful if you've found yourself having mistakenly closed all your open tabs, and having to go through your history to open the links again.

This may sound like a very obvious feature, but if you mainly use Google Chrome on your phone as you're sharing links on social media and messaging apps, having all your tabs closed can be a huge annoyance.

Sometimes the little things like this can make a big difference, so it's encouraging that Google has this ready to go in its development releases for now.

Via XDA Developer

Daryl Baxter
Software & Downloads Writer

Daryl had been freelancing for 3 years before joining TechRadar, now reporting on everything software-related. In his spare time he's written a book, 'The Making of Tomb Raider', alongside podcasting and usually found playing games old and new on his PC and MacBook Pro. If you have a story about an updated app, one that's about to launch, or just anything Software-related, drop him a line.