Restore a session

Restoring is where saved sessions pay off. TabControl gives you four flavors of restore, from “give me everything back” to “just this one tab I closed by mistake.”

1. Click the TabControl toolbar icon.
2. Click the session you want.
3. Click Restore.

Safari opens a new window (or several, matching what was captured) and reloads every tab. The tab that was active at capture time becomes active again. Pinned tabs restore as pinned. Discarded tabs restore as discarded — they won’t load until you click them, which keeps memory usage reasonable even for sessions with hundreds of tabs.

By default, restore appends: your existing Safari windows stay open and the restored session opens alongside them.

If you’d rather the restore replace your current windows, toggle Close current windows before restoring in Settings → Tab Save/Restore. With this on, restoring closes everything you have open first, then reopens the saved session.

The quickest way to recover from a close-everything moment. Press ⌃⌥R anywhere Safari has focus and TabControl restores the most recently saved session.

Useful when:

• You just ran Save & Close and immediately changed your mind.
• Safari crashed or restarted and you want your last good state back.
• You’re bouncing between a few saved contexts and always want “the last one.”

Sometimes you don’t want the whole session, just one tab from it.

1. Click the session to expand it in the popup.
2. Click the specific tab row.
3. Choose Open tab.

The tab opens in your current window without restoring the rest.

Deleted sessions aren’t erased immediately — they go to the trash (a soft-delete state). Within the retention window you can get them back:

1. Open the TabControl app, or click the toolbar icon and choose Settings.
2. Go to Sessions → Trash.
3. Find the session and click Restore.

The session moves out of the trash and back into your regular list. Restoring from trash doesn’t reopen the tabs — it brings the record back. You’d then restore it the normal way.

If Safari quits unexpectedly while you’re working, TabControl can often recover what was on screen.

Every minute (by default), TabControl writes a lightweight snapshot of your current windows to a crash-recovery slot. It’s not a full saved session — just enough to rebuild the tab list.

Next time you open Safari, TabControl shows a prompt: Restore tabs from your last Safari session? Click Restore to get them back, or Dismiss to ignore.

You can turn crash recovery off in Settings → Tab Save/Restore. It has almost no performance cost but it also has almost no upside if you never crash.

• URLs that 404 now. TabControl restores URLs, not cached content. If a page has been taken down since you saved, you get Safari’s own “can’t connect” page for that tab.
• Extensions that require login. Restoring doesn’t restore login state. A session full of internal dashboards may need you to sign in again — this is a Safari behavior, not a TabControl one.
• Private browsing tabs. Restored sessions that included private tabs restore them as non-private tabs. Safari doesn’t let extensions open private windows programmatically.

• Organize with categories — label sessions so restoring is easier.
• Archive and trash — how the soft-delete model works in detail.