Every time you restart your Mac and re-launch Safari, all the windows and tabs from your previous session will disappear. Instead, you’ll see the default Safari homepage. This can be annoying if you are like many users who want to pick up right where they left off with their web browsing.
So if you’ve been wondering how to restart your Mac without losing your Safari tabs, here are some quick fixes you can try.
1. Pin the Tabs in Safari
If you almost always use a certain website, you can pin that tab to your Safari browser. When you pin a tab, or multiple tabs, you don’t have to open them manually or worry about losing them each time you close and relaunch your browser.
When you open Safari, pinned tabs appear immediately, ready for you to access them. And even when you open a new Safari window, you never have to worry about losing your tabs. Every tab you’ve pinned appears the same on every window, so you don’t need to worry about having different versions of the same tab on multiple windows.
Pinning a tab is not difficult. Just follow these steps:
Start by opening the website you’d like to pin. Then Control-click the tab. A dialog should appear; choose Pin Tab from the options. Repeat this process for as many tabs as you’d like to pin.
Alternatively, you can place your cursor on the tab you’d like to pin and drag it to the left until the tab shrinks to the size of the website’s logo.
There appears to be no limit on how many tabs you can pin on Safari at once. We tested up to 25. However, whatever the number you have, you should learn how to manage your pinned tabs in Safari.
2. Customize Safari’s Settings
You may not have favorite tabs to pin. And having so many tabs permanently pinned to your Safari windows might be too much clutter for you. However, if you’d prefer to resume right where you left off whenever you open Safari, there’s another simple fix in the settings.
To customize Safari’s settings:
Look to the top-left corner of your screen and click on Safari. In the menu that appears next, click Preferences. A new General window should appear; look for the Safari opens with menu. Click on the corresponding A new window option. From the list of dropdown options, you can select All windows from last session or All non-private windows from last session, depending on whichever you prefer.
Once you’ve completed these steps, re-launch Safari. Once you open Safari, it should open the tabs from your previous browsing session.
3. Use Safari’s New Tab Button
The first two fixes are preventive strategies. If you implement them before restarting your Mac, they can prevent you from losing your tabs once you relaunch Safari. However, you may have restarted your Mac without implementing either strategy. In that case, you still don’t have to worry about losing your tabs because you can use Safari’s New Tab option as a corrective strategy.
You may think Safari’s New Tab icon has only one purpose: to create a new tab. But it can also help you recover your recently closed tabs. Just look at the toolbar and Control-click on the New Tab icon, which looks like a plus (+). A list of Recently Closed Tabs should appear, so you can select the one you’d like to recover.
4. Use the Undo or Reopen Action
After restarting your Mac and launching Safari, you may decide to close some tabs you no longer need. If they are a lot, you might get carried away with the monotonous task of clicking Close and accidentally closing a tab you still need.
A quick fix that can help you correct that mistake is the Undo menu or keyboard shortcut. Rather than panic when you’ve closed a tab or fumble with your settings, use the Undo action. It is pretty straightforward. Just follow these two steps.
Look to the top-left corner of your screen and select Edit from the options. A dialog box should appear with a list of options; click Undo Close Tab.
A quicker fix is the keyboard shortcut. To open the last tab you just closed, press this combination of keys: Shift + Cmd + T to reopen your last closed tab.
If you closed more than one tab, repeat the sequence for as many tabs as you’d like to restore. Our Safari shortcuts cheat sheet contains more keyboard shortcuts you can try on your Mac.
5. Reopen Tabs Using Your Safari History
You may have accidentally closed a window, or there may be simply too many tabs to keep pressing the combination of keys we mentioned earlier. Don’t sweat it. Launch Safari and do the following. To view your history:
Look to the top-left corner of your screen and select History from the options. A dialog box should appear with a list of options for you. You can choose any of these three options: Recently Closed, Recently Last Closed Tab, or Reopen All Windows from Last Session. Click the relevant option to reopen your recently closed tabs, or find the specific tab you’re looking for in the Recently Closed dropdown.
Improve Your Browsing Experience on Safari
Losing a tab may be frustrating, but it shouldn’t affect your productivity too much. With these quick fixes, you can ensure you never lose a tab on Safari if you restart your Mac. And when you close an important tab by mistake, you can always recover it.
Safari offers a brilliant browsing experience, arguably better than many other browsers, like Chrome. The experience becomes even smoother once you learn some essential Safari tricks and tips and implement them on your Mac.
