Accidentally closing a tab is very frustrating experience when your internet connection is less than ideal or when the webpage was heavy. Google Chrome is looking to mitigate this issue by caching the closed tab for a short period of time.
The feature looks like it will function similarly to how Chrome caches webpages that can be accessed with the forward and backward buttons. When a user closes a tab, Chrome will cache the website for about 15 seconds, and if the user decides to reopen the tab within that period, Chrome will pull data from the cache.
This should result in faster perceived loading times as Chrome will not completely reload the website data from the internet, instead it will load the necessary from local storage.
Naturally, this will increase the amount of cache used by Chrome, so Google will have to think of some way to ensure the browser cache doesn’t become too large.
The feature was spotted within the code of Chromium Gerrit, so it is pretty much in its early development stage. We expect it to be rolled out as a flag in the Chrome Canary build to begin testing soon, and hopefully will come to everyone later.