Accidentally closing the Chrome browser is a major pain, especially if you have a lot of tabs open; who has time to wait while Google reloads all the tabs?

Fortunately, as Android Police discovered in the new Chromium Gerrit, Google seems to be working on a new "magic trick" that will reduce reload times to almost zero.

The change involves "three new commits in Chromium Gerrit" that are designed to work together to instantly reload lost Chrome tabs. This allows you to return to whatever you were doing immediately, even if you accidentally close the Chrome window.

Apparently, this feature works in a similar way to Chrome's back-forward cache. This is because you may have noticed that when you press the back button, Chrome instantly loads the previous web page.

In this case, Chrome stores a cached version of the web page in memory, and this update basically does the same thing for closed tabs: Chrome stores the closed tab in memory for 15 seconds, giving you enough time to restore the tab. Chrome stores closed tabs in memory for 15 seconds, giving you enough time to restore the tab. They are also cached, so they pop up instantly without the need for annoying reloads.

Android Police points out that this is not exactly a new feature, but one not previously seen on desktop devices; Chrome for Android already has a system for caching closed tabs, but it is more basic, not freeze pages to reduce CPU usage.

As a regular user of Chrome's desktop browser, I'm quite happy to see this feature coming; it's not too difficult to restore a lost tab by pressing Shift+Ctrl+T (Command+Shift+T on Mac), but having to wait for it to reload It is tedious to have to wait for it to reload.

I often have quite a few tabs open at the same time, and if I'm lucky, it's always the last one to be restored. It's a shame that this feature is still a ways off; the fact that it's not in Chrome's Canary channel means that I can't really test it, and it will be some time before it rolls out to the stable browser.

I eagerly await the day when restoring lost tabs takes less time than the average Windows update.