You have the same pull request open three times, the same spreadsheet twice, and a documentation page you keep re-opening from Slack because it is faster than finding the tab you already had. Here is how to clear them, and then how to stop making them.

Neither Chrome nor Edge has a “close duplicate tabs” button. What they do have is enough to handle a handful by hand.

Method 1: the tab search list

Press Ctrl+Shift+A (Cmd+Shift+A on a Mac), or click the small chevron at the right end of the tab strip. You get a searchable list of every open tab, across all your windows, with recently closed ones underneath.

Type part of a page title and the duplicates line up next to each other, because they have the same title. Hover any row and an × closes it without leaving the list, so you can clear several in a few seconds.

What it will not do is tell you a tab is a duplicate. You are eyeballing a sorted list, which works at ten tabs and does not at eighty — and two copies whose titles differ by a word, or which sit in different windows, never line up next to each other at all.

Method 2: the address bar, before you open anything

This one is genuinely useful and almost nobody knows it. Start typing a page’s name or URL in the address bar and look for a Switch to this tab suggestion on the right of a result. Press it, or arrow down to it and hit Enter, and Chrome jumps to the tab you already have instead of opening a second one.

Edge does the same thing. It is the only native feature in either browser that actually prevents a duplicate rather than helping you clean one up, and it works across windows.

The catch is that it only fires when you navigate from the address bar. Every duplicate you have ever made came from clicking a link, and a link never asks.

Method 3: close them by hand, in bulk

If you just want the tab strip back:

  • Right-click a tab → Close other tabs clears everything except the one you are on.
  • Right-click → Close tabs to the right is the gentler version, and usually the right one, since your oldest tabs are on the left and those are the ones you meant to keep.
  • Hold Ctrl (Cmd) and click several tabs to select them, then close the selection in one go.

Blunt, but for a window that has got away from you it is faster than being precise.

Why duplicates keep happening

Worth naming, because the fix follows from it. A duplicate is almost never a decision. It is a link from a chat, an email, a search result, or a “view issue” button — and the browser has no reason to think you did not mean it. The tab you already had is often in a different window, so you never see the collision. Then the two copies drift: you scroll one, log into the other, and now you genuinely do not know which is the live one.

That is also why “just be tidier” is not advice. The behaviour that creates duplicates is clicking links, and you are not going to stop.

Method 4: have the browser handle it

Latr does the two things the browser does not.

It marks them: its tab list shows every tab across every window, with each duplicate labelled with the word “duplicate” rather than a colour you have to decode. The copy you have had open longest is the one left unmarked, so the thing you keep is the one with your scroll position and your session in it. Find duplicate and idle tabs then closes the extras in one press.

And it prevents them. With that on, a link onto a page you already have open takes you to the tab you had, and closes the new one — the address-bar behaviour above, applied to links, which is where the problem actually comes from. A notification tells you it happened and one click undoes it.

The guards matter more than the feature. It only ever acts on a tab opened from a link in another tab, within ten seconds of that click — so an address you typed, a bookmark, a restored window and a tab you deliberately duplicated are never touched. It also never closes the only tab in a window, because from the outside that is the browser disappearing.

One more thing worth knowing if you are comparing extensions: closing duplicates requires permission to read your tabs, and most extensions that do it ask for that at install, in the dialog that says it can read your browsing activity. Latr’s install dialog shows no warnings at all — tab access is optional and requested at the click that needs it. Decline it and nothing else in the extension changes.

It is free, there is no account, and it works the same in Chrome and Edge.