How to Set Chrome to Open Specific Tabs on Startup

Chrome has three different startup behaviors, and most people are stuck on whichever one it shipped with — usually "Continue where you left off," which means every launch drags along however many tabs you left open last time, good or bad. If you want the same handful of pages every time instead, that's a different setting, and it takes about thirty seconds to configure.

Open the startup settings

Go to chrome://settings/onStartup, or navigate there manually: Settings (three dots, top right) → On startup, in the left sidebar. Chrome shows three radio options:

1. Open the New Tab page — one blank tab, every time.
2. Continue where you left off — restores your entire last session, tabs and windows included.
3. Open a specific page or set of pages — a fixed list you define, unrelated to whatever was open last time.

Set a fixed list of startup tabs

Select "Open a specific page or set of pages." Two ways to build the list:

• Add pages one at a time. Click "Add a new page," paste or type a URL, and repeat for each page you want. They open in the order you added them.
• Capture your current tabs in one step. Click "Use current pages" — Chrome grabs every tab open in your current window right now and adds the whole set at once. This is the fastest way to turn an already-arranged "morning setup" — email, calendar, a project doc — into a permanent startup list without retyping URLs.

Once saved, that exact list opens every time you launch Chrome — not last session's leftovers, not a blank tab. To change it later, come back to the same settings page, remove a URL with the X next to it, or add more with "Add a new page."

Why this beats "Continue where you left off" for a fixed routine

"Continue where you left off" sounds convenient, but it means your startup state is whatever chaos was on screen when you last closed the browser — forty tabs from last night's research spiral included. A fixed startup list decouples "what I always want open" from "what happened to be open last time":

• Consistent mornings. Email, calendar, and a dashboard open the same way every day, regardless of how messy yesterday's session got.
• A clean slate without losing your must-haves. You can close everything at night without worrying you'll lose the pages that matter — they reopen on their own next launch.
• No creeping tab count. Sessions that snowball tab-by-tab never carry over, because startup no longer depends on session state at all.

Where startup pages don't help

A fixed startup list is built for a handful of pages you open the same way every day — it's not a place to park research, articles, or anything you're not ready to act on yet. Add too many "just in case" URLs to the list and you've recreated the same clutter you were trying to avoid, just moved to a settings page instead of a tab strip.

It also doesn't travel. Startup pages are a per-device Chrome setting, not something that syncs as a distinct "startup profile" you can hand between a work laptop and a home desktop the way a saved collection would.

Amazing Tabs covers the part startup pages don't:

• Save a tab once, open it from anywhere — searchable by title or content, not tied to one device's settings.
• Collections instead of a flat startup list, so "research for project X" and "daily tools" don't have to live in the same undifferentiated list of URLs.
• Free for up to 100 saved links, so the pages you're not ready to commit to a startup slot still have somewhere better than an open tab to live.

Startup tabs handle the pages you open every day. Everything else needs a home too. Add Amazing Tabs to Chrome — free, no signup. Save what you're not ready to open yet, and keep your startup list to what you actually use daily.

Quick recap

• chrome://settings/onStartup has three modes: blank new tab, restore last session, or a fixed set of pages you define.
• "Use current pages" turns whatever's open right now into your permanent startup list in one click.
• A fixed list beats session restore for a consistent daily routine — it's immune to however messy your last session got.
• It's desktop-only — Chrome on Android and iOS always restores the last session, with no fixed-list option.
• Don't overload the list — startup pages are for daily-use pages, not a place to stash tabs you're not ready to deal with yet.

Further reading: How to Pin Tabs in Chrome for keeping a few pages always in reach once Chrome is already open, How to Sync Tabs Between Devices for carrying more than a fixed startup list across machines, or How to Set Your Homepage in Chrome for the manual, click-to-navigate counterpart to startup pages.