Safari 'Recently closed tabs' feature reportedly bugged as tabs appear in random order & recently forced closed tabs go missing

Apple works on providing advancements of features in order to enhance the user experience in its devices. The ‘Recently closed tabs’ is one such feature in Safari that helps users retrieve recently closed tabs.

However, the feature is not working for some as expected.

Safari Recently closed tabs bugged

Some Safari users are experiencing a bug where the ‘Recently closed tabs’ feature is reportedly showing links from weeks, months, or even years ago, according to reports (1,2,3,4,5).

Very very strange bug: in the “recently closed tabs” list on iOS, Safari is only showing me things from what looks like 2019. 🤨
I can tell because it shows links to PG&E’s pages on outages.
The bug is weird, but it also feels weird that this old history still exists somewhere.
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In safari by pressing plus button on tabs page you can see recently closed pages. The problem is sometimes, especially when there were a lot of closed pages, order of them showing seems pretty random.
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The issue appears to be affecting users widely.

Some have reported that only the first 2-3 links in the Recently closed tabs section are the latest ones, while the rest are from much earlier periods, including times when they had wiped their browser history.

Tabs being force-closed and missing

Some users have also reported that Safari is automatically closing their tabs after an update, and these closed tabs are not showing up in the Recently closed tabs section either.

All my most recently opened tabs in safari have disappeared (and they’re not in recently closed), any ideas on how to get them back?
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One user on Reddit reported that they had lost over 170 tabs when they closed Safari. The closed tabs also disappeared from the Recently closed tabs section.

Some tried restoring from a backup, but the closed tabs were still missing.

This suggests that the issue may not be limited to the Recently closed tabs feature but may be a more significant problem with Safari’s tab management.

The problem appears to have been around for several years, with reports dating back to at least 2012.

Apple has not yet officially acknowledged the issue, and it is unclear whether they are working on a fix.

However, users who are experiencing this problem may be able to work around it by using a third-party browser or by manually managing their tabs to avoid relying on the Recently closed tabs feature.

This bug may seem minor, but for users who rely heavily on Safari’s tab management, it can be a frustrating and time-consuming problem to deal with.

We hope that Apple takes note of the trouble caused by the Recently closed tabs being bugged in Safari and addresses it as soon as possible.

Until then, keep tabs on this story as we will update it with further developments, whenever we spot any.

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