A while ago, I realised I had a ridiculous number of tabs open in Chrome, which is my phone’s web browsing app. A “tab” is basically another word for a webpage that you have open – it’s called that because on a computer, having multiple tabs open looks a bit like having a stack of address cards, with the little tabs at the top to help you navigate between them.
When you close the web browser on a computer, that usually closes any webpages you were looking at. However, on a phone or tablet, it won’t close a webpage (or an open tab) unless you specifically tell it to, which means you can easily end up with more open tabs than you can shake a stick at.
These tabs can include things like results from any searches you’ve done, on Google or just on your phone, sometimes there’ll be pages from adverts that you’ve accidentally tapped on or links from your emails, or just websites that you needed to use. So here’s how to close them when you’re finished with them…
When you open your web browser on your phone or tablet, which will be either Safari, Google Chrome, or possibly Samsung’s Internet app, there’ll be a square with a number in it in the top right corner. That tells you how many tabs your device currently has open – you might be surprised by how big the number is!
You can tap on that number to get little previews of each tab in a grid on your screen. From there, you can close any tabs you don’t need to keep any more by tapping on the little cross in the top corner of each one.
Doing this on a fairly regular basis can help your device to run a little faster and load webpages a little quicker in future.