The first seconds after opening Chrome set the tone for the entire browsing session. Whether Chrome opens to a new tab page, to a specific set of sites, or to whatever was open when it was last closed depends on one setting — but that setting interacts with performance, session management, and workflow habits in ways that make the choice more meaningful than it first appears. Most users have never changed the default startup setting and may not realise the options exist. You’ll find the complete rundown in our How to Manage Google Chrome.
The three Chrome startup settings — what each actually does
| Setting | What opens on launch | Best for | Performance impact |
| Continue where you left off | All tabs from the last session, restored in the same order and tab group arrangement | Users who treat Chrome tabs as a persistent workspace across days | Highest — all tabs load simultaneously on launch |
| Open the New Tab page | A single clean new tab page with no previously open tabs | Users who close tabs deliberately and start fresh each session | Lowest — only the New Tab page renders |
| Open a specific page or set of pages | The specific URLs configured in the startup pages list, regardless of previous session | Users who begin each session with the same daily-use sites | Moderate — loads only configured startup pages |
The practical performance difference is most pronounced on machines with limited RAM. “Continue where you left off” with twenty or thirty open tabs from the previous session can consume 80–90% of available RAM in the first two minutes, making the machine unresponsive while tabs compete to load. On a laptop with 8GB, switching to “Open a specific page or set of pages” with six curated startup pages reduces launch-time RAM demand dramatically — the browser is responsive from the first seconds rather than after a two-minute loading period.
“Open the New Tab page” is the fastest-loading option. Chrome renders only the built-in new tab page without any network requests or DOM construction beyond that. It suits users who treat each Chrome session as discrete and self-contained, pairing naturally with Chrome bookmarks as the continuity mechanism — important ongoing work is bookmarked rather than kept as open tabs.
Configuring the specific pages startup option
Chrome Settings → On startup → “Open a specific page or set of pages” → the startup pages list appears, initially empty, with “Add a new page” and “Use current pages” buttons.
- “Add a new page”: adds a single URL to the startup list
- “Use current pages”: captures all currently open tabs and adds their URLs simultaneously — faster than adding each URL individually when the current session already contains exactly the sites the startup set should contain
A reasonable startup set: work email client, project management tool, calendar, and one or two reference resources used throughout every workday — sites that are opened deliberately at the start of every session regardless of what the previous session contained. For most users, four to eight startup pages strikes the right balance: enough to surface daily essentials without creating an overwhelming launch.
Editing the list after initial setup: hover over any entry to reveal an edit (pencil) icon and a delete (X) icon. Pages can be reordered by drag-and-drop — the first URL in the list becomes the leftmost tab, the last URL becomes the rightmost. Arranging in the typical usage sequence during the opening of the workday makes the startup set feel integrated rather than arbitrary.
Startup pages configured here sync across devices through Chrome sync when the Settings data type is included in the sync scope. This is useful when the same daily-start sites are relevant across both a desktop and laptop — but potentially unwanted if the startup set includes applications only accessible on the local network or tools only available on a specific device. Users who want different startup pages on different devices need to either disable Settings sync or use separate Chrome profiles.
Chrome startup settings and session restore after crashes
“Continue where you left off” is also the mechanism that enables Chrome’s crash recovery. When Chrome closes unexpectedly — a crash, a forced system shutdown, a power loss — the next time Chrome opens, it detects the abnormal closure and offers to restore the previous session.
This crash recovery behaviour is partially independent of the startup setting: even if the startup setting is “Open the New Tab page,” Chrome offers session restore after a crash because the restore offer is triggered by the abnormal closure detection, not the startup setting itself. The startup setting determines normal launch behaviour; crash detection overrides it when needed.
The interaction with sleep or hibernate states is worth understanding specifically. When a computer is put to sleep (memory preserved) rather than shut down: Chrome is suspended in memory, not closed. Waking from sleep restores Chrome to exactly the state it was in before sleep without triggering any startup setting behaviour. Startup settings only apply when Chrome is fully closed and relaunched. Users who put computers to sleep rather than shutting down effectively maintain session continuity without using “Continue where you left off” — sleep/wake preserves tabs independently.
Performance optimisation through startup settings
“Continue where you left off” and Chrome’s Memory Saver feature work together better than they work separately. Memory Saver throttles inactive tabs after a period of inactivity, reducing their memory footprint significantly. With Memory Saver active, restoring a session with twenty tabs doesn’t hold all twenty at full memory — tabs that haven’t been clicked since restoration drop to the throttled state within minutes, releasing the bulk of their RAM while remaining navigable from the tab bar.
The combination of “Continue where you left off” and Memory Saver enabled produces session continuity with a more manageable memory profile than the restore option alone would suggest. Our guide on Chrome Memory Saver covers the configuration that makes this combination effective.
The startup setting choice interacts with the browser’s overall resource footprint in a cumulative way. Each additional startup page is a tab that begins loading on launch. Three startup pages is essentially the same as “Open the New Tab page” in terms of load impact; fifteen startup pages approaches the performance cost of “Continue where you left off” for a modest session. The sweet spot is between four and eight — enough to be useful, light enough to stay fast.
Our guide on Chrome’s new tab page covers the appearance customisation that complements the “Open the New Tab page” startup option, and our guide on Chrome profiles covers per-profile startup settings for work vs personal browsing. For the technical implementation of session restore including checkpoint frequency that determines how much state is preserved in a crash, Chrome’s developer documentation covers the session restore mechanism in detail.
Advanced: profiles, sync, and multi-device consistency
Startup settings are profile-specific. For Chrome users who maintain separate profiles — one for work and one for personal browsing — startup settings are configured independently for each. The work profile can be set to “Open a specific page or set of pages” pointing to work tools, while the personal profile is set to “Open the New Tab page” for a clean start in personal browsing contexts. The two never interfere regardless of which profile was used most recently or which tabs are open in the other.
“Continue where you left off” with multiple profiles: when Chrome restores a previous session under this startup setting, it restores the session for each profile independently. Switching between profiles in a restored session takes you to that profile’s restored tabs. For users who maintain separate profiles with active ongoing sessions in each, this setting provides continuity for both simultaneously — making it the most practical startup option for multi-profile Chrome users who treat both profiles as persistent workspaces.
Clearing the startup configuration: switching modes from “Open a specific page or set of pages” to another option doesn’t delete the configured URLs — they’re preserved and become active again if the specific pages mode is re-selected. The startup settings have no permanent deletion; switching modes simply stops using the list until it’s re-activated.
Choosing the right setting for your workflow
The startup settings decision reduces to one question: does continuity between sessions add value to the specific workflow, or does a clean start serve it better?
- Creative and research workflows where in-progress context must persist across days: “Continue where you left off” is correct despite the launch performance cost
- Structured daily workflows with consistent morning sites: “Open a specific page or set of pages” provides the best balance — daily tools available immediately, session not burdened by the previous day’s accumulated tabs, fast launch
- Session-discrete browsing where tabs are closed deliberately at session end: “Open the New Tab page” rewards the discipline with the fastest-launching Chrome experience
The setting takes three seconds to change and carries no irreversible consequences — experimenting with each option across separate weeks and observing which produces the best start-of-day experience is the most reliable way to find the right configuration. Deliberately observing which pattern actually describes how Chrome gets used day-to-day produces a more informed choice than selecting based on theoretical preference alone.
Startup settings and Chrome extensions
Chrome extensions load on every browser launch regardless of the startup setting chosen — an extension with 50MB of memory footprint consumes that RAM whether Chrome opens with “New Tab page” or “Continue where you left off.” The startup setting affects tab loading; the extension overhead is fixed at launch regardless of setting choice.
This means that on machines where Chrome feels slow at launch despite using the “Open the New Tab page” setting: the culprit is often extension loading rather than tab loading. Opening the Chrome Task Manager (Shift+Esc) immediately after launch and checking which processes are consuming the most RAM identifies whether extensions or the startup tabs are the performance bottleneck. If extensions dominate: the startup setting is not the performance problem, and an extension audit addresses the root cause.
The “Use current pages” button — a practical tip
The most underused feature of the specific pages startup option is the “Use current pages” button, which captures all currently open tabs and adds them to the startup list at once. The practical workflow for building an ideal startup list: open Chrome, spend a few minutes navigating to exactly the sites you want Chrome to open every morning, then go to Settings → On startup → “Open a specific page or set of pages” → “Use current pages.” The entire current session becomes the startup list in one click.
This approach works better than manually typing URLs because it captures the exact URLs — including any specific views, filtered states, or query parameters — that the pages use, rather than the homepage URL that might not show the same useful view. A project management tool’s “My tasks” view has a different URL than the tool’s homepage; “Use current pages” with that specific view open captures the right URL automatically.
Viewing and editing the startup pages from the address bar
A quick way to reach the startup settings without navigating through the full Settings menu: type chrome://settings/onStartup directly in the address bar and press Enter. The On startup section loads immediately in the Settings page without requiring navigation through the Settings home page. This shortcut is useful for quickly checking what’s in the startup list, adding a new page, or switching the startup mode — particularly when the startup behaviour seems off and you want to diagnose it quickly without remembering the full Settings navigation path.
Chrome startup settings, despite being a single three-option choice, have more depth than most settings in Chrome because they interact with memory management, crash recovery, profile-specific customisation, cross-device sync, and daily workflow habits simultaneously. Getting this one right produces a browser that starts each day ready to work rather than spending the first minutes loading and competing for resources. The right answer varies by workflow, hardware, and work style — but the right answer exists for each user, and the three options are distinct enough that it’s worth deliberately choosing rather than accepting whatever Chrome defaults to. If this sounds familiar, Chrome Print Settings is worth a look.
