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Google Chrome's New Tab page has the Recently Closed button at the bottom which hasn't included a link to History. It will be good if there is link to History either at the bottom of the list or at the top of the list, because one need to click the wrench menu, then click History button or (Ctrl+H).

I need to know the answers for the following points:

  • Is the decision for skipping History link in Recently Closed made
  • If there is a link to History, which area will be better (Top or Bottom) of the list
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  • I have thought about this issue as well and don't see any reason why it shouldn't be there. I would like it to be there in the "Recently Closed" Menu. – Mohit Apr 5 '13 at 7:35
  • In the recent update of Chrome Version 30, there is a link to access history from Recenty Closed Menu – Charles Green Way Oct 30 '13 at 11:59
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I'm taking a wild guess, since it's very hard to find out "why" on anything Google does. However, I think the choice is more useful since it supports how we use the web today. Back in the days (early 1990s) when the web was static, it was simple and easy to look at the history to find out where you were last.

Today that's a different story. We use rich web applications rather than static web pages. As a consequence - the history looks awful and is very hard to browse through to see where you were. Recently closed make much more sense. As you can see from my two following screenshots of recently closed (in Swedish ~ sorry), and the chrome://history.

enter image description here

... From recently closed, there are only three valid records in the history tab (marked in yellow) Some pages are still even open in other tabs, and thus not showing in recently closed:

enter image description here

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  • Attachments were missing in the posted answer. Could you pls attach again.. – Charles Green Way Apr 5 '13 at 9:19
  • @CharlesGreenWay Try to reload the page and see if you see them. They are there (I've checked as signed in and not sigtned in user). – Benny Skogberg Apr 5 '13 at 9:23
  • Sorry Benny, I and my friend have reloaded the page but couldn't find the attachment. I find the answer to be useful especially History looks awful – Charles Green Way Apr 5 '13 at 9:48
  • Work fine for me. Is Imgur.com blocked where you work @CharlesGreenWay ? Can you see other images in posts on this site (Such as the one in this question )? – JonW♦ Apr 5 '13 at 11:30
  • Yes @JonW you are right, I am behind a proxy in my work location and the website is blocked. Now I am able to see the images by bypassing the proxy.. – Charles Green Way Apr 5 '13 at 11:44
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I suspect user testing/analysis has shown them that common user errors are:

1) closing a web page accidentally (very easy to do in multi-tab browsing)

2) closing a web page then remembering either instantly or sometime soon after something that you wanted to check/do on that page

This leads to the user goal of re-opening a page they were just on. "Recently Closed" maps to this goal much more directly than the ambiguous "History".

So "History" is probably a redundant (and unclear) function that is not used to achieve this goal and therefore was not included.

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