You closed the wrong thing. Maybe one tab, maybe the window with all of them in it. Here is the answer, shortest first, and then the part nobody tells you: how far back each of these actually reaches, and what to do when you are past it.

The shortcut

Ctrl+Shift+T on Windows and Linux. Cmd+Shift+T on a Mac. It works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi and Opera.

Press it once and the last tab you closed comes back, at the position it was in, usually with its scroll position and its history intact - so Back still works. Keep pressing and it walks backwards through everything you have closed this session, one at a time.

If the thing you lost was a whole window, the same shortcut brings the window back with all its tabs, not one tab at a time.

The menu that goes further

The shortcut only walks backwards from the most recent thing. If you closed eleven tabs and want the fourth one, the menu is faster.

  • Chrome and Edge: the three-dot menu, then History. The top of that submenu lists Recently closed, with whole windows grouped as one entry. Ctrl+H opens the full history page if you need to search it.
  • Firefox: the hamburger menu, then History, then Recently Closed Tabs or Recently Closed Windows - two separate lists, which is worth knowing when a window is what went.

After a crash, or a restart

If the browser closed unexpectedly, the next launch usually offers to restore the previous session - take that offer before you open anything else, because opening new tabs first is how people lose the prompt.

Missed it? History → Recently closed often still holds the previous session for a while. In Firefox, the History menu carries Restore Previous Session outright. You can also set Chrome, Edge or Firefox to reopen your last session at every startup, in Settings under On startup (or Open previous windows and tabs in Firefox), which turns this whole class of accident into a non-event.

Where the browser’s memory ends

This is the part that catches people out, and it is why “just press Ctrl+Shift+T” is not a complete answer.

  • The list is short. Recently closed holds a limited number of entries. It is long enough for a mistake you made this morning. It is not a record of last week.
  • It is per session. Restart a few times and the oldest entries are gone.
  • Clearing browsing data clears it. So does anything that cleans history on exit.
  • Private and incognito windows keep nothing, by design. A closed incognito tab is gone.
  • A tab group that went with its window may come back as loose tabs rather than as the groups you had, depending on the browser and how it closed.

If you are past all of that, two things sometimes still work: search your history by Ctrl+H for a word in the page title, which survives far longer than the recently-closed list; and check your browser profile’s session files only if you are comfortable doing that, because the browser overwrites them as it runs.

The real fix is not a shortcut

Every route above is recovery after the fact, and each one depends on the browser still holding something it was never promising to hold. If you have hit this more than once, the problem is not that you press the wrong X - it is that closing a tab is the only way to get rid of it, so a tab you are not finished with has to stay open, and a window of forty tabs is one accident away from being a bad afternoon.

That is the whole reason Latr exists. It makes closing safe rather than recoverable:

  • Put a time on a tab and close it. The page comes back on its own at the moment you chose, where you stopped reading - not in a list you have to remember to visit.
  • Save the whole window, tab groups, names and colours included, and restore it as a window rather than as a pile dropped into whatever you were doing.
  • Let it save one for you. Autosave keeps the last few versions of your window as you work, and Latr can keep a window at the moment you close it - so the accident is already covered before it happens.
  • And Latr’s own list of recently closed windows is on the saved-tabs page, named after what was in them rather than as ten identical “5 tabs” rows.

It is free, there is no account, and the install dialog shows no permission warnings. If you found this page because you had just lost something, the shortcut above is the fix for today

  • the rest is how you stop needing it.