Monday, February 21, 2011

Internet Explorer's Reopen Last Browsing Session

If you have used Internet Explorer 8 at all, you may be familiar with the new feature introduced with version 8.0 which allows one to re-open his/her last browsing session.  Of course, Firefox and other browsers have had this feature for quite some time, but it is brand new to Internet Explorer 8.

However, I discovered that this feature does not work quite as nicely in IE 8 as it does in Firefox and other browsers.

When you are clicking on links through a website, on some occasions you may right click on the link and "Open in New Tab" or else you may just follow the website's default hyperlink behavior.

In some cases, clicking on a hyperlink will open a brand new Internet Explorer window.  Of course, once this occurs, a brand new "session" is opened.  This poses a bit of a problem for Internet Explorer's "Reopen Last Browsing Session" feature.  Since 2 "sessions" are now active while you are browsing through Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer will only be able to retain 1 of them.  Well, how is that decided?

As it turns out, the last windows to close is the last one that will be retained.  Therefore, if you have 2 windows open with multiple tabs opened in each window, the window which you close last will be the one that will be retained and reopen when you select "Reopen Last Browsing Session" from the Tools menu.

So how do you work around this problem?  Well, one way is to add all of the tabs from your 2nd window to the previously active window and then close the 2nd active window.  Then, when you close the resultant active window, all of the currently opened tabs will continue to be retained.

Personally, I like to use Firefox, Chrome or Opera whenever possible, but when you are forced to use Internet Explorer, this tip may be a good thing to know.

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