Chrome Is Opening New Tabs by Itself: How to Stop It

You’re reading something, minding your own business, and suddenly there are three tabs you didn’t open — one’s an ad, one’s a fake warning, one’s a page you’ve never seen. When Chrome is opening new tabs by itself, it’s rarely a mystery: it traces back to a browser extension, a site you once gave pop-up permission to, or software that bundled in adware during another install. Google has an official process for this, and it doesn’t start with reinstalling Chrome or shopping for antivirus software.

Below is that process, in order — the ad and malware cleanup, Site Settings, Safety Check, Task Manager, and Chrome’s startup settings — plus how to tell which one applies to you, and how to keep the tabs you actually want open while you sort it out.

Why Is Chrome Opening New Tabs by Itself?

Chrome opens tabs on its own for one of three reasons: a browser extension acting up, a site you once allowed to show pop-ups, or software that installed adware alongside something you wanted. Google’s own troubleshooting page treats all three as versions of the same problem (“unwanted ads, pop-ups and malware”) and gives you one cleanup process to run rather than a separate fix for each.

What matters more than the exact cause is the pattern. If Chrome opening random tabs happens no matter which site you’re on, that usually points to an extension. If the tabs are full of ads, casino pages, or “your computer is infected” warnings, that’s the classic adware pattern Google’s guidance targets first. If the pop-ups are tied to one specific site you visit often, that’s a permission you granted months ago and forgot about. And if the extra tab only shows up the moment you launch Chrome, that’s not malware at all. It’s a startup setting, covered further down.

Work through the sections below in order. They follow Google’s own sequence, starting with the broadest fix and narrowing down as you rule things out.

What Are Google’s Official Steps to Fix Unwanted Tabs?

Google publishes a single four-step process for exactly this problem, and as of September 2026 it’s the same sequence whether the cause turns out to be an extension, a site permission, or adware.

That’s the whole official process. To stop Chrome from opening new tabs without your permission, most people only need the first two steps — the rest of this article expands each one so you know exactly what to click and why it matters before you get to the more drastic option at the end.

How Do You Check Site Settings for Pop-Ups and Intrusive Ads?

You check Site Settings by opening it for the page that was active when the tabs first appeared and resetting its pop-up and “Intrusive ads” permissions. Chrome remembers permissions per site, so if you clicked “Allow” on a pop-up prompt months ago (maybe without fully reading it) that site can still open windows today.

This step alone solves a surprising number of cases, especially the ones where the pop-ups only happen on one or two sites rather than everywhere you browse. If you’re still seeing tabs after resetting permissions on the obvious suspects, move on to Safety Check next. It looks at the browser as a whole instead of one site at a time.

How Do You Run Chrome’s Safety Check?

You run Safety Check from Settings > Privacy and security > Safety Check, and it reviews your extensions, permissions, and a few other settings in a single pass. It’s the third of Google’s four official steps, and it exists specifically to catch the things a manual look at Site Settings might miss.

Safety Check doesn’t require you to know what you’re looking for. You open it, let it run, and it surfaces anything worth reviewing — including extensions that may not belong or permissions that look unusual. If it flags an extension you don’t remember installing, that’s a strong lead: unwanted tabs and unrecognized extensions go together often enough that this is one of the fastest ways to narrow down the cause.

Safety Check covers more than tabs. Safety Check also reviews saved passwords and your Chrome version, not just extensions and permissions. Treat those results separately — a flagged password has nothing to do with the tab problem, even if it shows up in the same scan.

Run it even if you’ve already fixed something through Site Settings. Safety Check is quick, and confirming there’s nothing else flagged is a reasonable way to close out the middle of Google’s four-step process before deciding whether you need to go further.

Could a Browser Extension Be the Real Cause?

Often, yes — a single misbehaving extension is one of the more common reasons Chrome starts opening tabs no one asked for. Extensions run in the background on every page you visit, which makes them a convenient place for unwanted behavior to hide, whether that was the developer’s intent or the extension changed hands and started behaving differently.

The fastest way to test this is Incognito mode. Chrome disables extensions in Incognito by default, so if the tabs stop appearing there, you’ve all but confirmed an extension is responsible.

Run the Incognito test first. Open an Incognito window with Ctrl + Shift + N (Cmd + Shift + N on Mac) and keep browsing normally for a while. No new tabs there strongly suggests an extension is the cause.

Once you suspect an extension, open chrome://extensions to see everything installed. From there you can turn off or remove anything you don’t recognize, starting with whatever was added right before the problem began. That timing is usually the biggest clue you have. If you enabled an extension to work in Incognito too (via its Details page), turning it off there as well confirms whether it was the source.

How Do You Use Chrome’s Task Manager to Spot the Culprit?

You open Chrome’s Task Manager with Shift + Esc on Windows, Linux, or ChromeOS; on a Mac, open it from the Window menu at the top of the screen, or right-click an empty part of the tab strip. It lists every open tab, extension, and background process together with resource columns for memory, CPU, and network use.

This matters because an extension causing tabs to open often keeps running even when you’re not actively browsing — and Task Manager is one of the few places that makes background activity visible. If one row is using noticeably more memory, CPU, or network than everything else, and it’s an extension rather than a tab, that’s worth investigating immediately at chrome://extensions.

Task Manager won’t tell you exactly what an extension is doing, only that it’s active and consuming resources. Combine it with the Incognito test from the previous section for a fuller picture: Incognito tells you whether an extension is involved at all, and Task Manager helps you narrow down which one once you know to look.

Is It a Startup Setting, Not Malware?

Sometimes, yes — if the extra tab only shows up the moment you launch Chrome, and never while you’re actively browsing, it’s likely a startup setting rather than anything malicious. Chrome’s startup behavior is controlled under Settings > On startup, and it’s worth ruling this out before you assume something is wrong.

If your setting is “Open a specific page or set of pages” and you’re seeing a page you didn’t add, something (an install, an extension, or someone else using the computer) modified that list. Removing the unfamiliar entry fixes it immediately, no scan required.

Chrome also has a separate homepage setting under Appearance, distinct from the startup pages above. The homepage only opens when you click the Home button, so it can hold a different page than your startup pages without conflicting. Confusing the two is a common reason people go looking for malware that was never there — check both before you move on to anything more involved.

When Should You Reset Chrome to Its Default Settings?

You should reset Chrome only after you’ve tried the ad and malware cleanup, Site Settings, and Safety Check, since Google lists it as the fourth and final step in its official process. You’ll find it under Settings > Reset settings > “Restore settings to their original defaults.”

Resetting is a broader change than it sounds. It’s described specifically as restoring settings to their original state, which is different from clearing your browsing data — but it’s still enough of a shift that you shouldn’t reach for it first. If the three earlier steps haven’t worked, though, it’s a reasonable next move rather than a last-ditch guess.

Back up before you reset. Chrome restarting during a reset is common, and you don’t want to discover mid-reset that you needed one of your open tabs. Save your session before you start, not after something goes wrong.

If new tabs keep appearing even after a reset, that’s a sign the cause sits outside Chrome itself — worth a look at what else is running on the computer, rather than continuing to adjust browser settings that clearly aren’t the source.

How Do You Keep Your Tabs Safe While You Troubleshoot?

You keep your tabs safe by saving them as a session before you start any of the steps above, since resets, extension removals, and Chrome restarts can all close windows you meant to get back to. None of the fixes here are things you want to run with forty research tabs open and no backup.

BelayTab is a free browser extension that saves your open windows as named sessions and restores them later, with no account required and no limit on how many you keep. It takes automatic snapshots of every window every five minutes, and again the moment you close a window, so even if you forget to save manually before a reset, there’s likely a recent snapshot waiting for you. Saving on purpose is just as fast — one click or Ctrl + Shift + S (Cmd + Shift + S on Mac) — and it keeps tab groups, pinned tabs, and tab order intact.

Everything shows up on one Recovery screen — snapshots, anything you’ve deleted within the last 30 days, and the browser’s own recently closed windows — so you’re not hunting through several menus after the fact.

What Should You Do If the New Tabs Keep Coming Back?

If the tabs keep coming back after all four official steps, revisit which step matched your situation, since a mismatched fix explains most repeat cases. Chrome’s Task Manager and the Incognito test are worth repeating too — a second extension can be behind a problem that looked solved.

If the cleanup steps and a reset genuinely haven’t resolved it, the cause may sit outside Chrome (in the operating system rather than the browser) which is beyond what browser settings alone can fix. For everything short of that, working the four official steps in order, with the Incognito and Task Manager checks alongside them, resolves the overwhelming majority of cases.

While you’re troubleshooting, it’s worth reading up on Chrome’s Task Manager in more depth and on how startup pages work, since both come up constantly in reports of tabs opening unexpectedly. And if the real issue turns out to be dozens of legitimate tabs rather than anything malicious, our guide to tab overload covers that separately. Whatever the cause, saving your tabs before you start is free, quick, and means troubleshooting Chrome never has to cost you the tabs you were using. You can grab BelayTab from the download page in under a minute.

For more on what a saved session protects, see how restoring tabs and saving sessions work, or how automatic snapshots and the Recovery screen fit together. If it turns out an extension really was the source, our piece on how Incognito tabs work explains why that test is so reliable, and if a reset leads to a rockier restart than expected, what to do when Chrome crashes covers getting your tabs back afterward.

Google’s own reference for the full unwanted ads, pop-ups and malware cleanup steps is worth bookmarking, along with its pages on Chrome’s On Startup settings, using Chrome’s Task Manager, and how Incognito handles extensions. Chrome itself, as covered on our Chrome browser page, updates these tools often enough that it’s worth checking the official pages directly if something here looks different from what you see on screen.