Avoid accidentally nuking all of your Android Chrome tabs with this new confirmation dialog

Open the Chrome browser on your phone and tell me in the comments how many tabs you have accumulated so far. How often do you go back to them and actually use and close each tab after you build them up? Are you like me and gain over a hundred tabs, attributing value to them over the course of a month or several months only to decide down the line that closing them all at once is just less stressful?

Well, not everyone does, and I’ve even been guilty of nuking them all and regretting it shortly afterward. Luckily, a new developer flag for Chrome Canary (version 100) on Android, which was first discovered by Techdows, adds a much-needed confirmation dialogue box that will prompt you before you make the mistake of destroying every last one of your Chrome tabs.

Close all tabs modal dialog

Shows a confirmation modal dialog when clicking ‘Close all tabs’ in theapp menu. – Android

#close-all-tabs-modal-dialog

After enabling the flag, you can test this out by entering Chrome, tapping the tabs icon at the top right of the mobile browser, and then choosing the vertical three dots “more” menu. From there, just tap “Close all tabs” to see the new dialog. It says “WARNING: This action cannot be undone. Close all tabs and lose any unsaved data?” You obviously shouldn’t do this if you want to keep your tabs, but yeah, it will then be a safeguard against such a mishap.

I’m really not sure why Chrome doesn’t have this feature to date, but as I always say, this is not something that surprises me. Most other Google applications have close confirmation warnings for content, and Chrome – of all services – should have had this from day one.

Let me know in the comments if you agree with this sentiment. There’s currently no indication on when or even if this feature will make its way to Chrome for Android’s stable version, but it ought to as it can almost be seen as a necessity nowadays. You can install Chrome Canary (Unstable) from the app badge below, but if you’re a regular user who isn’t interested in living on the bleeding edge, you may just want to wait for this to roll out on the regular Chrome app.