Chrome May Soon Close New Tabs When You Press Back, Like Safari

Google is working on a change in Chrome that alters what happens when you press the Back button in a tab opened from another tab.

The company has started implementing a Back to opener feature. It closes a newly opened tab and returns focus to the original tab when the user presses Back.

The behavior applies to tabs opened using common actions. These include Ctrl or Cmd + click, middle-click, “Open link in new tab,” and links that use target=”_blank”.

Chrome is working on a Back button change for new tabs

This change affects how the Back button works in newly opened tabs. Instead of doing nothing, the Back button can close the tab and return focus to the page that opened it.

With the new behavior in place, the Back button will no longer do nothing in newly opened tabs that have no browsing history.

Instead, Chrome will close the current tab and switch focus back to the tab that opened it. This provides a faster way to return to the original page without manually switching tabs and closing the extra one.

The feature design notes point to link aggregator sites such as search engines and AI chat tools as a common case. These sites often open results in new tabs to preserve context, but Chrome’s Back button does not return users to the original tab, which forces extra clicks to switch tabs and close the newly opened page.

How Safari and mobile browsers handle this

Safari on macOS already handles new tabs this way. When a user opens a link in a new tab and presses Back, the tab closes and Safari returns to the original page.

Mobile browsers follow a similar model. Back usually returns users to their previous context instead of leaving them on a page with no history. Chrome on desktop has not offered this behavior so far.

The back to opener behavior is intentionally limited. It does not activate in every situation. It is disabled if the original tab was closed, if the original tab navigated to a different page, if the newly opened tab is pinned, or if the tab was restored after a browser restart or session restore. In all of these cases, the Back button behaves the same way it does today.

When back to opener is available, Chrome makes the Back button active even if the tab has no navigation history. Right-clicking or long-pressing the Back button also shows the original page’s title and site icon. This helps users understand what will happen before they click.

The feature is being implemented in Chromium behind a flag for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Once it becomes available for testing, it will bring Chrome’s Back button behavior closer to what users already see in Safari and on mobile.

Chrome is testing Google Lens as an AI sidebar assistant and a Contextual Tasks feature, while Google is also working on a more immersive Reader Mode in Canary with fewer toolbar buttons.