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I want my previous browsing tabs to be restored when restarting Safari. I can do this in Firefox and Chrome. Is there a setting or an extension for this?

EDIT: So it turns out I was killing (word choice?) the Safari browser (and the Chrome browser for that matter). When I just Quit the browser my previous browsing is always maintained... So rather than get an extension or anything I believe the solution is just to Quit the browser?

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8 Answers 8

Reset to default
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After starting Safari, you can go to History -> Reopen All Windows from Last Session to have Safari reopen the windows and tabs that were open when you last used it.

There's some additional info in this question: Is it possible to restart an application using AppleScript?, including a script (Chealion's answer) that can be modified to start Safari and call that menu automatically.

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  • It seems my question was not clear. As long as I close the browser using Command+Quit, my tabs seem to be maintained. Thanks for the answer though...
    – gary
    Dec 13, 2010 at 17:05
  • Lovely. :) Didn't know how you could do this before, so I stuck with Chrome. :|
    – JFW
    Apr 2, 2011 at 4:20
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I have been using SafariRestore from Safari Extensions. It works quite well.

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  • Am I right that this involves "storing" the sessions prior to closing them? It seems like an extra step beyond just using History > Reopen All Windows from Last Session.
    – gary
    Dec 3, 2010 at 22:42
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    @Gary the thing is that the “Reopen all windows from last session” is relatively new and it can fail if you don’t do it immediately after reopening. Whereas the Extension will have the session saved until you replace it.
    – Martin Marconcini
    Dec 4, 2010 at 3:57
  • I agree, I have had that feature fail on me a couple of times. A dumb flash site decides to crash the whole browsers and voila! the whole session is gone.
    – Rohan Monga
    Dec 4, 2010 at 4:00
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Just reopening after quitting Safari doesn't seem to restore the windows for me. (Or anymore?)

So to summarize:

  • History — Reopen All Windows from Last Session or History — Reopen Last Closed Window
  • SafariRestore, Sessions or SaveTabs
  • Glims or Saft
  • Bookmarks — Add Bookmark for These ␣ Tabs...
  • In Lion there's Safari — Quit and Keep Windows (⌥⌘Q)
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  • great summary, I think covered it all. Didn't know about the Lion trick though. Is there a menu option for point and click? I guess this should be expected; one of the "tent poles" of Lion is native resume across the OS similar to iOS.
    – John
    Apr 1, 2011 at 2:43
  • @HandyRandy It's in the Safari (or application) menu, but shown only when you hold ⌥. It could still be changed though. Can you (or anyone else) try if windows still get restored after quitting?
    – Lri
    Apr 1, 2011 at 14:04
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May I suggest, the free extension, Sessions. It restores last session and even saves sessions for later retrieval. It's stable with useful features like search, export, remove duplicates, micro-management, KB shortcuts & startup behavior settings.

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There are lots of Safari Extensions here... Some of them are Session Managers which will sure do what you want ;-)

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Not automatically, but you can click "Bookmarks \ Add Bookmark for These 3 Tab" which will create a folder containing bookmarks for all the currently open tabs.

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As mentioned in the edited question, the solution seems to be to just Quit (command+Q) the browser rather than killing/restarting etc.

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  • Exactly. I went through the same process myself, lol. Let me guess, you just switched from Windows to Mac, huh? The native, simple solution is to quit and reopen last session from History menu. The thing that irks me is there is no keyboard shortcut fro this, lol. This is one of the fundamental principles of Mac OS X which starkly contrasts to Windows. The window is really a "document". Closing all windows does NOT "quit" the app. However a handful of random apps WILL quit after closing the last window. Fortunately it's usually just the apps where it makes sense to do so.
    – John
    Feb 2, 2011 at 21:39
  • Yep, still getting the swing of the Mac. Using Command+Q seems to work with tabbed browsers as well as text editors.
    – gary
    Feb 3, 2011 at 3:44
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Glims will remember the history of your previous session, like Firefox and Chrome do. None of the other suggestions here will do that. They'll only show the last page you looked at in those tabs.

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