Surely more than once we have closed a tab by mistake. And, the greater the number of tabs we have open in the browser, the more likely this is to happen to us. Google Chrome has a “recent tabs” section that allows us to quickly see everything that has been closed lately and reopen the web that we want. And if not, we can always go back to looking for the page in the history.
The problem is that, when recovering a tab closed by mistake, Chrome reloads it from scratch, which can make us lose information that we had entered in it, in addition to time. And this is where the new Closed Tab Cache feature comes in.
How Closed Tab Cache works
Some versions of Chrome ago, Google introduced a feature called Back Forward Cache. This function, what it does is save a cached copy of the webs through which we are moving so that, if we go back, the return is instantaneous instead of having to reload the page in question.
The browser’s new Closed Tab Cache feature relies heavily on the code in this Back Forward Cache. What this new feature does is save all the tabs that we close in a kind of special cache so that, if we have closed one by mistake, we can reopen it instantly, without having to load it completely again.
To open the newly closed tab, we can choose to use the browser’s context menu, go to the “History” section of the browser menu, or as fast as possible, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + T.
How to test this new feature in Chrome Canary
For now, Google has only included it in the Canary branch of the browser. In addition, the company warns that it is a very, very experimental and unstable function, and that it can give us many problems when navigating. Therefore, we should only use it to test it, and not activate it in our day-to-day web browser.
To have a first contact with her, the first thing we must do is make sure that we have the latest version of Google Chrome Canary installed, which we can download for free from its website.
In addition, we must also activate the experimental flag in the browser to enable this feature:
chrome://flags/#closed-tab-cache
Once activated, and the browser restarted, we can try to open a page in a tab, close it and, when recovering it (with the keyboard shortcut, for example) see how it returns instantly instead of loading from scratch.
