How to Close All Tabs Except One in Chrome

Thirty tabs open, and you only actually need one of them right now. Closing twenty-nine tabs one at a time with Ctrl+W is slow and error-prone — Chrome has a faster, built-in way to do it in a single click.

Close all tabs except one

1. Right-click the tab you want to keep.
2. Choose Close other tabs from the context menu.
3. Every other tab in that window closes immediately — only the one you right-clicked stays open.

There's no dedicated keyboard shortcut for this in Chrome. If you'd rather stay on the keyboard, focus the tab you want to keep, press Menu (or Shift+F10 on Windows/Linux) to open its context menu without a mouse, then select "Close other tabs" with the arrow keys and Enter.

Keeping more than one tab

"Close other tabs" doesn't have to mean "close down to exactly one." Chrome supports multi-selecting tabs:

• Ctrl+click (Cmd+click on Mac) each tab you want to keep, adding them to a selection one at a time.
• Shift+click to select a contiguous range of tabs instead.
• Right-click any tab in the selection and choose Close other tabs — Chrome closes everything outside the selection and leaves your chosen set open.

This is the difference between "I need only this one tab" and "I need these three tabs from this pile of thirty" — both go through the same menu, just with a different selection first.

What "Close other tabs" doesn't do

A few limits are worth knowing before you click it:

• Window-scoped only. It closes other tabs in the same window as the one you right-clicked. Tabs open in a second Chrome window, or in another profile, are untouched.
• No confirmation, no undo prompt. Chrome closes the tabs immediately — there's no "are you sure?" dialog, so a misclick on the wrong tab closes the wrong set.
• Nothing is saved anywhere. Closed tabs don't go into a folder or a list you can browse by title — they're gone from the tab strip, recoverable (for a while) only through Chrome's closed-tabs history.

The safety net if you close the wrong ones

If "Close other tabs" takes out something you needed, Ctrl+Shift+T (Cmd+Shift+T on Mac) reopens tabs in the order they closed, most recent first. It's fast and reliable for the last few minutes, but the underlying list isn't searchable and has no guaranteed retention — the full breakdown is in How to Recover Closed Tabs in Chrome.

For a bulk close like this, that gap matters more than usual: you might not notice a tab is missing until hours later, by which point native recovery is a lot less certain to still have it.

Save first, then close with confidence

The more reliable habit is to save anything worth keeping before you mass-close, so "Close other tabs" never risks losing something you actually wanted:

Amazing Tabs makes that a five-second step instead of a reason to hesitate:

• Save the whole window with one click before you clean it down to a single tab, so nothing rides on Chrome's closed-tabs history.
• Search by title or content afterward — no scrolling through a closed-tabs list trying to remember which of thirty tabs had the thing you needed.
• Group saves by project, so a batch of research tabs you're about to clear stays together instead of scattering into one flat history list. See How to Organize Chrome Tabs by Project for the pattern.
• Free for up to 100 saved links — enough to save a full cleanup's worth of tabs before you start closing.

Clear your tab strip without the risk. Add Amazing Tabs to Chrome — free, no signup to install. Save what matters, then hit "Close other tabs" without a second thought.

Quick recap

• Right-click the tab to keep → "Close other tabs" closes everything else in that window in one step.
• Ctrl/Cmd+click first to keep more than one tab, then use the same menu option.
• It's window-scoped, has no undo prompt, and doesn't save anything — only Ctrl+Shift+T offers a way back, and only for a limited time.
• Save what you'd miss before you close, and a big cleanup stops being a gamble.