One research report for Back To Close: the takeaway, search demand, traffic, pricing, reviews, competitors and what to build. Every number shows its source and date. Anything we cannot verify is marked.
Takeaway & demand
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Traffic & domain
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Reviews
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Competitors & ranks
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Build opportunity
What to build, what an MVP must fix, and how to position it
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As a longtime user of the "Close on Back" extension, I appreciate the ever-so-slight yet thoughtful imprrovements "Back to Close" provides.
CoB works by first appending #closeonback to the end of whatever URL you navigated to, then it quickly navigates to the original URL. For example, if you type google.com it first sneakily becomes google.com#closeonback before moving "forward" to the originally typed google.com link. In effect, this means that after your search induced rabbit hole you navigate backwards in history all the way back to the Google homepage - you'll still be able to tap/swipe/click back one more time till the #closeonback URL triggers the tab to close.
Meanwhile this extension seems to function pretty much the exact same way - but without the visual clutter.
No extra stuff sneakily appears in your address bar, but it still "just works" all the same.
Also if you long-press / right-click the backwards button to reveal your navigation history you don't end up with a duplicated starting site (to use the prior example, on the CoB extension you'd see 2 entries for "Google" at the earliest stage – the second-last being google.com and the very last being google.com#closeonback – but that difference is only apparent if you pay close attention to the quick changes that take place in the address bar when navigating backwards, just looking throught the 2 identical website titles in your history it's impossible to tell the difference unless you already knew this is how CoB works. Meanwhile, on this BtC extension, your nav history will look more readily apparent, like this: ❌ Close Tab ⬅️ Google Home ⬅️ Search Results ⬅️ WebPage A ⬅️ WebSite B ⬅️ etc. It's not cluttered with multiple identical "Google" entries at the start, unlike the confusion that CoB can cause)
Long story short, both Cob and BtC are small, simple and straightforward utility extensions that focuses on doing one thing well – whether you click the backwards button built into the browser UI, or you tap the backwards keyboard combo to nav back, or you prefer to use your mouse/trackpad to simply use swipe gestures to go back to the beginning of your browsing session – both CoB and BtC will result in a seamless experience where that last swipe gesture results in your current tab's browsing session closing out and landing you on the next tab that's presumably full of nav history for you to work your way through (or if no other tabs are left, the browser window will close out completely). It's a small and easy to overlook functionality, but that just means it works so smoothly and organically fits into your browser that it blends right in.
All that being said, if I had to choose between the two, I'd recommend "Back to Close" over "Close on Back" to others. I recognize that CoB is the original that's been around for years and is currently at version 3.17 whereas BtC is a recent newcomer on the block that's still at v1 - nonetheless, while CoB has gotten the bare minimum browser compatibility updates over the years it's functionally stayed pretty much the same, whereas BtC improves on the competition's basic implementation by focusing on clearer, cleaner presentation (no extra cruft snuck into your address bar, no needless clutter in your nav back history, heck I even think this extension's icon design is clearer in what it does too) resulting in a better overall user experience in daily usage giving it the slightly sharper edge
Alex M
Worthless
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