Get Your Incognito Tabs Back After a Browser Crash or Restart
Chrome doesn't restore incognito tabs after a crash or restart, so they're gone for good. Here's how to recover the incognito tabs you had open when things went wrong.
June 3, 2026
When Chrome crashes or you restart your computer, normal windows usually come back. Chrome offers to restore your tabs, and your session picks up where it left off. Incognito windows don’t get that treatment. They simply disappear, and there’s no “restore” button waiting for you.
That’s by design: incognito is meant to leave nothing behind, including after a crash. But “I didn’t mean to lose that” is a very different feeling from “I wanted it private.”
Why incognito doesn’t come back
Chrome’s session restore reopens the tabs you had open before it closed unexpectedly. Incognito tabs are deliberately excluded. Chrome never saves them to disk, so after a crash or shutdown there’s nothing to restore from. Everything you had open in incognito is treated as gone the instant the browser stops running.
How to recover them anyway
Incognito Reopen & History keeps a private, on-device record of your incognito browsing as you go. So even when Chrome itself has nothing to fall back on, the extension does.
After a crash or restart, open the extension and you’ll find the pages you had open still listed in your Full history, even the ones that were open at the moment everything went down, which would otherwise vanish without ever being recorded. Click any of them to reopen it in incognito and rebuild your session.
If you closed a whole window before the crash, you can also restore it as a group, all tabs at once.
Still completely private
Recovering after a crash doesn’t mean your browsing went anywhere. The extension stores everything locally in your browser, with no account, no server, and nothing uploaded. And you stay in control of how long it’s kept, with auto-delete options ranging from “when my last incognito window closes” to a rolling number of days.
Install Incognito Reopen & History so a crash never costs you your incognito tabs again. It’s free.