Thread: Controlling access to the previous browser session in IE 8

Ouch! Clicked on the red cross by mistake and closed the browser. You might have wanted to search for more Information on the last site.

All sites visited so far are usually displayed in the browser in the 'History' function. However you cannot see whether these pages were the ones opened last. Internet Explorer 8 now offers a new command, for which you will need to go to 'Tools/Open last browser session again'. With that, you can replace the currently opened websites with the contents of the last session in new tabs. Exception: if you have surfed in the anonymous mode in the previous session, then those sites will not appear, but only of the last normal session.

If you want to block this function on a commonly used computer, you can do so with a new registry entry. For that, open 'Run' in the start menu, enter 'regedit' and press Enter. Then navigate to the 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\Policies\Microsoft\' key. With the 'Edit/New/Key' command, create the entry 'Internet Explorer'. Then open this and under that, create the sub-key 'Recovery' as described. Click in the right-part of the window and open 'Edit/New/DWORD value'. Enter the name 'NoReopenLastSession' and press Enter. To edit, double-click on the new value. Change it to '1' and confirm with 'OK', before closing the registry. There is no need to restart the computer as the change is immediately effective.

Henceforth, the new restoration function will be deactivated. However, remember that the visited sites, except those visited anonymously are still available in the browsing history. If you wish to use the function again, either remove the entry created from the registry, or simply assign it the value '0' to reverce the change.