Microsoft doesn’t want Edge users to wallow in despair when they close their tabs by mistake. Currently, if you accidentally press Alt + F4 keyboard shortcut or tap on the exit button of the window, Microsoft Edge or Chrome will simply exit without any warning.
Unwanted browser exit sucks, especially when you’ve several important browsing sessions open. Fortunately, Microsoft is now working on a solution to protect you from any unwanted accidents.
According to experimental flags found in Canary builds, you can soon enable tab protection in Microsoft Edge so you can catch your mistake before Windows or macOS closes the browser.
Basically, you just need to go to the Microsoft Edge settings and enable the ‘Ask before closing multiple tabs’ option, as shown in the screenshot below.
Once enabled, Microsoft Edge for Windows 10 and macOS will display a pop-up warning when you try to close multiple active tabs.
There’ll be two options – “Close all” to exit the browser and “Cancel” to keep using the browser. You can also select “Don’t ask me again” in the pop-up to disable this feature without opening the Settings page of Edge.
Microsoft Edge’s solution is elegant, and it won’t warn you when you only have a single tab open. The warning shows up only when you have multiple tabs open, but in future, it would be possible to always provide an alert if you try to quit.
If you want to test the feature right now, install Edge Canary and enable the experimental flag labelled as “Ask before closing multiple tabs”.
This feature is expected to arrive in the stable builds of Microsoft Edge early next year and it will save you a bunch of time if you’re prone to mistakenly closing your tabs.
In addition, Microsoft is also working on a new accent theme for Edge, improvements for the Android version, faster startup time, and more.
