How to Close All Tabs in Chrome at Once

Closing one tab is a click. Closing all of them — twenty, forty, whatever's piled up — shouldn't take twenty clicks. Chrome has a couple of ways to do it in one move, plus a short recovery window if you change your mind.

Close every tab with a keyboard shortcut

The fastest method skips the mouse entirely:

• Windows/Linux: Ctrl+Shift+W
• Mac: Cmd+Shift+W

This closes the entire window — every tab in it, in one press. If Chrome only has one window open, the browser quits. If you have multiple windows, only the active one closes; the rest keep running untouched.

Close every tab with the window's X button

Click the X in the top-right corner of the Chrome window (top-left on Mac). This has the exact same effect as the keyboard shortcut — every tab in that window closes at once. Chrome will typically ask you to confirm first if more than one tab is open, since this is a one-way action for anything not saved elsewhere.

What Chrome does — and doesn't — remember afterward

Closing all tabs doesn't erase them immediately. Chrome keeps a short list of recently closed items, including whole windows, so you can undo a bulk close:

• Press Ctrl+Shift+T (Cmd+Shift+T on Mac) to reopen the most recently closed window, tabs and order intact.
• Repeat the shortcut to step further back through recently closed tabs and windows, oldest last.

This safety net is time- and memory-limited — it holds a handful of recent closures, not a permanent history, and it clears when Chrome fully quits on some setups. It's a good "oops" button, not a backup plan.

Back tabs up before you close them, not after

If the tabs you're about to close are actually worth keeping — research, a project, tabs you'll want next week — closing them and hoping the recently-closed list still has them later is the wrong order of operations. Do the save first:

• Bookmark the whole window: Ctrl+Shift+D (Cmd+Shift+D on Mac) saves every open tab into one bookmark folder before you close anything.
• Copy every tab as a list: right-click any tab → Copy Links to grab every open URL as plain text, no folder needed. See our guide on exporting Chrome tabs as a list for the full method.

When "close everything" becomes a weekly ritual

If you find yourself bulk-closing tabs at the end of most days because the tab strip got unmanageable again, the recurring problem isn't the close — it's that nothing captured the tabs worth keeping before they went. Amazing Tabs turns the close into a save:

• One click saves the whole window into a searchable space before you close it — no folder to name, no list to lose track of.
• Press ⌘K (or Ctrl+K) any time afterward to find a saved tab by title or URL instantly, long after Chrome's recently-closed list has forgotten it.
• Free for up to 100 saved links, with optional cross-device sync on paid plans.

Close with confidence — save first, close second. Add Amazing Tabs to Chrome — free, no signup required.

Quick recap

• Ctrl+Shift+W (Cmd+Shift+W on Mac) or the window's X button closes every tab in that window at once.
• Ctrl+Shift+T (Cmd+Shift+T on Mac) reopens the most recently closed window if you change your mind — but it's a short-lived safety net, not permanent storage.
• Bookmark the window (Ctrl+Shift+D) or copy all links before closing if the tabs are worth keeping.
• To keep one tab open while closing the rest, see How to Close All Tabs Except One in Chrome.