When you restart your computer after a nasty Windows update, you find that all the tabs you previously had open in Chrome are now open in Microsoft Edge. While this seems odd, it is a real problem that users of both browsers are currently facing.

According to Tom Warren of The Verge, this exact same thing happened to him recently. Like many other Windows users, he prefers Chrome over Edge and has not set Microsoft's Chromium-based browser as his default browser.

In order to steer users away from Chrome and toward Edge, the software giant made it easy to import data such as bookmarks, history, and recently opened tabs from other browsers. During initial setup, Edge will ask if you want to allow synchronization with other browsers, so you can seamlessly go back and forth with Firefox as well as Chrome.

This is something that is often missed when setting up one of the best Windows laptops, and many users probably clicked accept without thinking twice. This option is also available in Edge's settings menu, but is off by default.

I have not confirmed this odd behavior myself, but after checking on three of my four Windows PCs, I noticed that this feature is enabled on my mini PC running Windows 11. Fortunately, it is very easy to turn this feature off.

First, open Edge and click on the menu of three dots in the upper right corner of the browser and head to Settings. From here, click on the Import Browser Data option, which will bring up the menu pictured above; if you don't see Import Browsing Data on each Chrome browser launch, don't worry,

if it appears, click Edit Preferences. This will bring up another menu where you can completely disable this feature so that your most recently opened Chrome tabs will not appear in Edge when you restart your PC or start your Microsoft browser. 13]

In the next menu, click on "Every time I start Import browser data from Google Chrome], click [Turn off] next to [Import browser data from Google Chrome]. A confirmation window will then appear, click "Confirm" to disable this setting. Before you do so, also check the Clear Microsoft Edge data imported from other browsers checkbox on all other synchronization devices that are signed in to your Microsoft account.

You are now done; Chrome tabs will no longer open in Edge after a Windows update or when you restart your computer. Even if you haven't seen this setting in Edge yet, it is worth going back and checking from time to time, as you might accidentally enable it when you are in a hurry after a Windows update.