tabs keep reopening after being closed

I had this problem,; it started with 15.0 for me, iPad mini 4. I found that the new SHELF for apps showing up at the bottom of the page was my culprit.

I had tried clearing the cache, history, un-synching, all of those things others have mentioned here.

My solution was to double-click the home button and bring up all the tabs on the shelf. Then I manually up-flicked each tab to close it and remove it. PIB. Took a while. They were gone from the shelf and stayed closed. If it shows up on the shelf, it will come back. ***Back up anything essential the first time you do this.*** After the initial purging, it becomes simple.

Place the tab links that you saved from the shelf as your backup into named groups using the new group tabbing feature. You can place many into one group. Then, just don’t remove those tab pages from the shelf. They’ll take up much less room this way. I think this just how the tabbing works now. The shelf will always be there. They will show up on the shelf, but there will be fewer, and it will be more organized.

I hope this helps.

I didn’t read anyone mentioning the “Done” button.

Have you tried long-pressing on the “Done” button in the lower right corner and closing all the open tabs (not the Done button on the keyboard)? First press on the two boxes in the lower right to get to the tab overview. Then long-press on “Done” and close all the windows at once.

I’ve had very stubborn tabs before. It’s been a while. Closing tabs in the tab overview has worked for me on iPhone and laptop. On laptop I can even close individual tabs. On iPhone, i had to close all of them at once.

Hope it works.

I finally figured out how to fix mine after months of failure. It was painfully frustrating, especially since my husband loves to tease me about how I never close my tabs :(

Context: Iphone XR with OS 15.3.1. Everything was set to individual tabs and if I made the mistake of opening a new tab, I would be stuck with that tab indefinitely. If I closed safari or restarted my phone and made sure tab sync was off, the tabs always reappeared.

I decided to do something crazy. I put all of my problem tabs in a group. Then I deleted that group. I closed safari and reopened it to check if the tabs were truly gone. .... they are! I don't know if this will help other people but hopefully this go-around does.

Apple's support of this problem has been a joke. It's a bug that requires a silly work-around. I'm hoping that this issue won't persist if I open new tabs, but at least if it does, I have a ridiculous fix that shouldn't even be necessary. So far, though, I have been successful at keeping those pesky tabs at bay since I removed them as I described above.

I think I may have found a fix if you go to settings and scroll down to safari you should find a close tabs I set it to manually and they stay closed.

Either that or it was because I closed safari while in the tabs section but I doubt it

Hope this helps

Update: I bookmarked the pages I want to save. I deleted all the tabs and force closed Safari. My tabs stayed closed. I tried putting them in a group first and deleted the group. That didn’t work.

Ok what I did was: 1. Press and hold the button on the bottom right corner of this page, it looks like 2 square on to of each other, then select close all tab groups, 2. After that, I powered of my phone by holding down the of and volume up button, when I turned the phone back in it worked, I hope it works for you

Hi there itsmekendallc,

Welcome to Apple Support Communities. Thanks for reaching out to us with this issue you're having with the tabs on Safari. We're happy to help.

The tabs reopening on their own certainly seems unexpected. Do you use iCloud Tabs by chance? This article covers what this is and how to set it up: Set up and use iCloud Tabs. If you have more than one device signed into your Apple ID, do you notice the same behavior in Safari when you close tabs?

Have you tried clearing Safari history on your iPhone and then testing again to see if that resolves the issue: Clear the history and cookies from Safari on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

Feel free to reach back out if you have any questions.

Have a great day!

I kind of found a temporary solution. Since my Safari tabs are synced with all of my Apple devices, I decided to troubleshoot to see what happens when I close tabs or tab groups on my tablet. I’ve been able to close tabs and tab groups on my tablet without those same tabs and groups reopening back up. I’ve also had the same result on my iPhone. Granted it’s not ideal, but it’s a solution that works for the time being. So if you have an Apple mobile device, hopefully this fix will work for you too.

I disabled all experimental features and the tabs didn’t come back so far (for half a day already). Maybe one of them keeps bringing back the tabs but I don’t know which one.

To disable experimental features: settings > safari > advanced > experimental features.

This is working for me:

someone in this thread posted this and I did it and it’s working.

I’ve had my settings switched for two days and I’ve been able to delete and add new tabs.

To disable experimental features: settings > safari > advanced > experimental features.

It was happening on my iPad. I am nowhere close to my storage limit, but I closed all of my apps by swiping up and the tabs I had closed in Safari have now remained closed. I hope this helps!

Yes, I had the problem with individual tabs, not necessarily the group. It wasn't the whole group having the problem, but the fact that the tabs were in a tab group, I think. Once I moved the tabs out of the group, everything was fine. Maybe it doesn't help in every case, but it might be a clue to the problem behind it?

I've been having the problem for a few months but it really got bad in the past few weeks. Just today, I watched half a dozen tabs open and close all on their own. As I searched for an answer, I saw tab groups mentioned as a peripheral problem and remembered I was using them. I took all my tab groups and begrudgingly saved them as bookmarks, deleted the groups, and the problem went away. I wonder if it would help to just get rid of the tab groups and the problem is not whether the tabs are grouped or not, but that the tab group function is being used? Again, maybe it's a clue but couldn't hurt to try. I have no idea but it worked for me!

I raised a support call with Apple. It’s been on going for maybe a month.

The solution I found to this is to make a full back up of your phone.

Sign Out of iCloud on the device.

Do a full factory restore.

Restore the back up to the phone.

Sign back into iCloud.

This so far seems to have cured the issue. I just hope it doesn’t come back.

How are you closing Safari? Do you swipe up from the Quick Launch screen to close the app after using it? If you do that, stop doing it.