Procedure For Disabling The Feature That Restores Last Browsing Tabs In IE8
IE8 or Internet Explorer 8 possesses a feature for reopening the last browsing session i.e. all the browsing tabs that were open while exiting IE. This feature is very much similar to the feature “Show My Windows/Tabs from Last Time” of Mozilla Firefox. The only difference is that IE 8 does not show the tabs from the last browsing session automatically when launched.
In case you do not like this feature which reopens all the last Browsing Tabs in IE8, you may turn off or disable it. Once you disable this feature, you will be unable to use the option “Re-open Last Browsing Session” which is present in the Tools Menu. Also when you open a new tab page, you will notice that the link to this option will not be displayed.
The feature Re-open Last Browsing Session can be turned off or disabled either by using Group Policy (GPO) Editor or by making changes in the System registry via Registry Editor. Setting the policy via Registry Editor is useful for users who run less-premium editions of Windows 7, Vista or XP as these editions do not include a GPO Editor.
Procedure for disabling the feature using GPO Editor:
- Type “GPEdit.msc” within the Run command box in Windows XP or Start Search in Windows Vista to open Local GPO Editor.
- Navigate to the below mentioned branch:
- User Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Internet Explorer
- Within the right Window Pane “Local Computer Policy”, you need to locate and enable the setting that turns off the Re-open Last Browsing Session feature.
- Close the GPO Editor
- Restart IE8 in order to make the changes effective.
Procedure for disabling the feature using Registry Editor:
- Open Run command box in Windows XP or Start Search in Windows Vista and type in RegEdit.exe to open the Registry Editor.
- Go to the Registry branch mentioned below:
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Recovery
- In case you do not find any registry keys by the name “Internet Explorer” or “Recovery”, you need to create them. Simply right-click on the parent branch, select “New” from the right click context menu and then choose the option Key. You need to name the keys accordingly.
- Now, within the right window pane, right-click on the blank space, select New and then DWORD (32-bit) Value for creating a fresh DWORD value. Name this DWORD value as NoReopenLastSession.
- Next, double-click and set the value data for NoReopenLastSession as “1”.
- Close the Registry Editor and restart IE8 in order to make the changes effective.
As another option, you may download the file Disable-Reopen-Last-Session.reg from the internet to disable the feature and Enable-Reopen-Last-Session.reg to enable it if required. You need to simply run the file to merge the respective values to the system registry.
The moment you disable the feature in order to prevent IE8 from reopening last browsing session feature, it is possible to set IE to restore the previous browsing session through the feature called automatic crash recovery which works only if IE crashes.