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Redesigning The "Back" Button
TheMatt writes "Nature Science Update is reporting today about research by New Zealand scientists on redesigning how the "Back" button works in your browser.
They point to the fact that the current "Back" is more of an "Up" in a stack of pages. They propose a system that records all pages visited. A good summary page of their efforts in web navigation (including a interesting thumbnail-style "Back" menu) can be found on their page."
seems that if i click the lil' arrow next to the back button in IE I already have a list of all the pages i've already been to (or at least the last 10 or so).
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
come to the U.S. and apply for a gov't grant to study this...probably get $5 million a year at least.
Important research!
Doesnt Amazon have a patent on this??
(groan)
The average web browser's "back" feature is almost the only software feature in existence that is universally understood, and works as advertised. If it aint broke...
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
IE 5.2.2 on OS X 10.2.3 has a nifty little feature where you can HOLD DOWN the mouse button and get a nice long list in reverse chronological order of the pages you've visited.
One could always use the History feature too.
Get to work on something REALLY useful, like a perpetual motion machine. Jeez...
Quintus malus puer est.
are you dumb? no reg required
How exactly is that research? It seems to be a pretty trivial piece of code to write. Hell it could be done in Visual Basic in 20 minutes I bet.
It's funny how usability is often over looked in many products, however once you give someone an interface (whether it be bad or not), and enough people are acustomed to it... it's really hard to change.
The Linux community has some great ideas that come out of it... but to move yer standard MS-gort to a linux machine, you have to throw out all their user experience with a computer OR you have to make Linux look like windows.
In developing web apps, the back button is a real !@#@!%!
--------
Free your mind.
For the labelling:
I prefer to think of my "back" button as working like a paper book. I generally don't flip pages "up" when going to a previous page, so the "back" terminology is friendly to me.
As for the idea:
All I really need the back button to do, for better efficiency, is to skip posted forms, that's all I want. What did I miss in that article that really make their system stand out from stacking? I like my stacks dammit.
xbox is huge!!!
So are the controllers
"They point to the fact that the current "Back" is more of an "Up" in a stack of pages. They propose a system that records all pages visited."
Yeah, you're going "Up" in a stack of pages that you've visisted. So who's the twerp that thought this needed to be fixed?
I figure that the browser caches all your recent data from the pages it visits and only requests the new stuff from the server.
Of course, there must be some way of discerning exactly what is new stuff, so I figure the server and the browser have a little conversation regarding file names and time/date stamps.
Of course, there's a lot I don't know about the Internet, so I could be completely wrong. I'd appreciate it if someone more knowledgeable than me straightened this out, please.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Like my daddy always said, "If you can't think of anything to intelligently post, post anyway." So here goes: with all the problems on the internet today the BACK button is like number 12,342,342,352,352,352,352,350,230,235,023,052,035 ,203 on the list of priorities. Number one being AOL CDs.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Bah, I thought of this years ago. Back buttons suck. So does the whole linear web browser model. I mean, it's the web, right? Why is it always back and forward? Why don't we see a web (graph) view?
I always wanted a web browser called "Sting" that displayed stuff like this and let you "cut through" the web. ;-)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
To me, that's the best thing about it, the UP button.
MjM
I only mod up...
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
when you start a browser.. it begins on your "home page" from there you may jump from site to site.. not necessarily deeper into a website, but more often than not, it is. So to me, the "Back" button has to do more with "Back Tracking" as in taking a hike, and back tracking towards "home".
Is what I think they're looking for.
Lave the back button alone. It does what it's supposed to perfectly well. As long as it's not applied to file-systems or any other PC arcana, it's perfect for the task.
If you want to make something that works for both file-systems or GUI shell browsing and web browsing, design a new tool. Don't overload the existing tools and make them useless for both tasks.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I like the fact that you can see the thumbnails, now only problem is your boss can walk by and see all the gamming and pr0n pages you have went to....
"Where's teh mention that you need to register to read this article?"
They probably never mentioned it because you don't need one.
Does anybody remember the OS/2 Warp (3.0) system web browser? I vaguely remember a really nifty tree display for page history that would show everywhere you were at one time and everywhere you went from there.
Why not make it *really* easy and develop a "forward" button that would actually take you to the piece of the Mega-pagecount-poorly-indexed-searchbuttonless web portal of doom that you're really interested in? They could call it the Psychic Fast Forward or some such.
Base it off of all of the Total Information Awareness data that the government wants to gather about us, so it predicts what you want.
And then place locks on your browser so that you really only want to go to the major sites.
Then eugenically engineer society so that you don't even know that you ever wanted to go somewhere else.
NOW we're making the web useful!!!!!!!!!!!
Insert witty crack about being able to sort through the time travel in science fiction movies here.
Wait, scratch the part about witty.
Chimera and Phoenix keep that information in the box, saving me from having to copy the text, just in case.
A feature I would like similar to 'back' would be to reopen the last page I was on when I last closed the browser. Often, I close the window and find that I still need some info that was on that last page. I hate browser history ie: I have that turned off, so I can't hunt through the history to quickly find the page.
That feature would be nifty. Or something to make me less of a spaz.
If it is not broken don't fix it!
Note: the scientist redesigning the back button is named "Andy Cockburn"
I'm actually more interested in the possibility of redesigning the functionality of the forward button.
In the current implementations, the forward button loses it's registry once you go back/up and then click a link. It's kind of like creating a new time line in your browser...you lose all the pages you had been to in the previous line...before you went back. Why should it be that way?
-R
Uhm, it goes up in the stack of recently visited pages, not in the stack of pages on the actual site.
Seems to me they're basically rewriting what the browser's back button does, only they're saying it actually does something new; a waste of time, IMHO.
By using script to change it to a "Stay-Here" button. Those are the sites you make a point of never bookmarking, or ever intentionally visiting again.
First of all, who still uses a mouse...press the backspace key
"Simon Says, Fuck You" - George Carlin
Yeah, the Back button is "up" for a down-growing vertical stack, but it's also "left" for a right-growing horizontal one. They're each equally intuitive and consistent, and the "left" model seems to be a pretty well-entrenched standard. I don't see any reason to mess with what is probably the easiest to use UI element in any modern web browser.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
The back button is fine the way it is.
If the Back button takes me to where I've been, why doesn't the Forward button take me where I haven't been yet? I want a button that takes me to where I'm going to go before I ask it. Is that too much to ask?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Use an "S" controller if you have little girl hands.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
This is news?
First, the back button in IE and Mozilla has a drop-down that will show the previous 9 or so pages.
Second, there is the History button/menu, which will display a full listing broken down by site and date.
Maybe some of these "academics" should actually pull their heads out for a look at the real world now and again.
Maybe I haven't had enough caffeine today, but I'm not understanding what this team has changed, exactly.
Every browser I've ever used has a back button that takes you through the history of every page you've visited, not just index pages.
What am I missing here?
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
It took a team of scientists to figure this out?
My karma is not a Chameleon.
So like, build a better mouse trap and stuff....
This team of 'scientists' wants to replace the Back button with the History tree?
Brilliant. Abso-Fucking-lutely brilliant.
You kiwis keep the hell away from my desktop.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
When you hit your back button and select another link, you're really branching the tree of visited sites.
It makes more sense to have an explorer-style tree view than a history. That way you can navigate a site and still have an idea where you have been.
Why are programmers doing this, and not user interface designers? Programmers excel at discovering and providing for edge cases, but nearly all UI decisions require discovering and optimizing for the common case. Optimally, the two approaches should work on the application together, but for UI-centric design decisions like how to make the back button work, most programmers simply bring the wrong approach to the table.
From the website, it looks like the author is involved and rather knowledgable about HCI, but the article doesn't mention anything about
Personally, I'd like more flexibility in a browser's back/forward functionality (and might get some use out of a variety of implementations). But, does your average user care at all? I'll bet most wouldn't even notice. Lots of websites integrate their own back/forward functionality anyway, which I'll bet get a fair amount of use. This may just confuse some of the simpler folk who want things to "just work".
By the way, have they patented this yet? If they plan on exploiting this, they've got 1 year (I think) from the date of publication, they'd better get to filing! Anyone smell a lawsuit coming in a couple of years?
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
I'm not an OS X user. But I wish I were. I really like the panel view (or whatever it's called) in the file browser. With every click, it shifts the panels to the left, and adds another at the current location. This gives a great visual view of history and allows you to sort of back up to the last wrong turn and go in another direction. It kicks the ass of the MS tree view. Something like this would be great in a web browser.
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
Stupid submit button; I wish it were placed a litle further from the preview button. :-/ Please ignore this comment: the site does mention his coworkers, and they all seem very involved and knowledgable about both HCI and programming. It would have been nice if the article had mentioned some of this.
Big Deal. They can change it all they want, but my dad still won't be able to figure it out.
As user of both Opera mouse gestures, and Windows Explorer, I know the difference between a "back" command and an "up" command. Both of these applications offer "back" and "up" and distinguish between them.
"Back" always takes you to the last place you were. Click it again, and it takes you to the place you were before that. "Up" in Windows explorer will take you to the parent directory of the current directory. "Up" in Opera will do the same, but on a website - it takes you to the parent virtual directory (from http://asdf.com/test/ to http://asdf.com, for example).
So I come into this article with those two concepts in mind, and when they tell me "back" should be called "up" I get really confused. These statements are also confusing:
What are "index pages"? I read that and think index.html - default pages. That can't be right though, because obviously the current system records more than just the default pages.This one I really don't understand. Pick a recent browser (Opera, Mozilla/Phoenix, IE) and you'll see the back button has an attached pull-down with your recently visited pages. As someone already mentioned, your history also lists your recently visited pages. Jeez, most people are pissed that their browser remembers TOO MANY recently visited pages (like when you start typing in the address bar and non-work-related sites pop up) rather than not enough.
Now if they're talking about a back button that can span browsing sessions, that might be interesting. It doesn't sound like they are though...after you read the article...
make sure you go "up" to slashdot, rather than "back" to slashdot to post a comment...
wtf???
they need to backup and rethink their verbiage (pun intended). psychologically, the way the human mind thinks of time and travelling, the back button just makes too much sense.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Can someone explain how this is different from the existing back buttons. I don't know about IE, but the behaviour described in the article seems identical to Mozilla's back button.
This sounds an awful lot like the Mozilla site navigation bar to me. This was removed right before 1.0 was released, which is why I'm still using a pre-1.0 version of Mozilla myself (well, that and the fact that Mozilla was already rock solid before 1.0).
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Not only is this poster sincere, but he is also quite right.
So install the Google toolbar if you're using IE, or the Mozilla variant if you're using Mozilla, and use the "up" button provided there. Whee.
Of course they were. The subjects are always extremely enthusiastic about new things they've never seen before. I would have a better chance of believing the paper if they would have had a few "extremely UNenthusiastic"s thrown in. As the paper stands, everyone liked pretty much everything that was thrown at them. That is BOGUS.
Sex - Find It
Instead of a back button, create a belly button.
The first thing I thought as I was reading the article was, as everyone else has commented, "how is this different?"
It really *is* different; the problem is that the article explains things very poorly. Here's the difference:
With normal browsers, when you click the back button to a previous page, and then follow a new link on the previous page, the page you were on before you clicked the back button and followed a new link, is removed from the list. This is what they mean by "stack" behavior.
What these guys are proposing is that every time you visit a page, it goes into the back list. Thus if you are on, say, page 2, and click the back button to page 1, then follow a link to page 3, the list stored in the back button is 1 - 2 - 3, and you will go back to page 2. In the current system, the list stored would be 1 - 3; page 2 is gone from the list and no longer available via the back button.
So now you know. Regardless, this behavior is already available in I.E. 5.x and above via the History explorer bar. A simple sort by Order Visited Today gets the list exactly as proposed by the article. Except for the thumbnails, however, which is a very good touch.
Personally, I think it would be best to have *two* such buttons; one that has stack behavior (current "back" button), and another that has the proposed temporal behavior; perhaps as a history pull-down menu.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Apparently the author of the article has never heard of the history button in IE.
That reminds me of an article I once read on IE 5 in which the author said "I wish the favorites were available via a drop-down menu like in Netscape." Sheesh...
I use Alt-Left instead of the mouse, and my
only real problem is Flash which sometimes
grabs these keys. I know some Flash games
use the keys, but advertisements need not.
Shame on them if it is intentional. My prefered
interface would be to right click and select
"enable keyboard" on each flash. Mozilla
could probably implement it without help from
the plugin.
Everynight it begins like this:
User browsing site, happy, shinny, dhtmly site.
User making a mistake.
User clicking 'Back'.
JavaScript automaton generating the pages going K-Boom.
Now if only I were granted one of those wishes:
- Being able to control the back button behavior
- Being able to say "this is braindead, let's use XUL" when my boss insists on writting a 10,000 lines javascript automaton for the core of his dhtml website.
Until then, I'll stick to the yellow pills.
If I'm browsing through a set of pages, and I go back three pages then click on another link, those three pages disappear. The problem is slightly alleviated with browser tabs, but those tend to clutter up my screen during serious surfing time.
Just because it isn't broke doesn't mean it can't be fixed. Windows is universally understood but that doesn't mean a more powerful solution can be found/hould be used/be optional for those who can handle it.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
Assuming something good comes out of this research into "a better back button", how long will it be before someone (Amazon perhaps?) claims they already invented the concept and patented it 10 years prior?
-Michael
Threshold RPG
The Mozilla project has had people working on this for almost 3 years now, see bug #21521 on Bugzilla (they deny links from Slashdot, so I won't even try). Unfortunately, there are technical problems that can't be ignored when designing a system like this. One of the stickiest problems is the fact that, as you browse, the history of where you went becomes larger and larger - it starts to act just like a memory leak. Using menu items for this (like the go menu or, I think, the back button's menu) makes the memory problem worse, since menus are memory intensive. There are also cross platform compatibility issues to deal with.
The article mentions the non-technical issues as well: "Unsurprisingly, it's harder to return to index pages with this system - so it's easier to get lost in big websites. New users tended to solve problems either very efficiently or very inefficiently." I believe that this is one of the bigger problems the developers of more advanced navigation systems face, how to provide controls that afford the user good access to the information.
I wish them luck. And if you want to see something like it in Mozilla, please vote for bug 21521 on Bugzilla. It's only got 7 votes, which is pathetic.
On the other hand, if no one cares, perhaps the answer really is to just let it drop. Once again, I wish them luck.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
The first thing I though of is that they are re-implementing the history tabsl; it already exists, and, as the article pointed out, getting home would get very hard very quickly. This would be senseless. My second thought is that they trying fix the damage caused by badly designed pages. These pages break the back button through scripting or Flash, thus confusing the user. These pages are also of IE specific. The fix for this needs to occur on the web page, not browser.
In the end, though, it makes no sense. I don't want a complicated back button. We can open new windows, new tabs, or go to the history if there is someplace special I want to go. Going to the previous page should be trivially simple. Now, if someone wants to implement a tree structure so that when I hold down the back button a set of submenus appear so I can choose places I went from certain pages, that makes some sort of design sense. Still, the simplicity of the fifo stack is compelling.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
For those who still think they're not coming up with anything different...
Basically they want a two-dimensional navigation button(s), not the current one-dimensional ones (back/forward).
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
I'm confused, all this research shows that people use the back button VERY frequently. I personally almost never use the back button. So what is it that people are doing that require the back button, maybe solving the need for one would be a better idea. Are people trying to visit list of links? How about a more obvious tabbed browsing UI. What are the other uses for back? Can anyone tell me. Personally long before tabbed browsing was available I always opened in new window. So I really am guinuinly confused as I havn't used the back button in years.
Although mostly defunct now, back in the bubble
days we had a company selling an IE add-on which
added an 'up' button to your browser.
By going 'up' instead of forward or back, you
stepped out to a meta-content page where you could
view other people's comments and related links
(ranked by popularity).
I would suspect that the owners of BrowseUp, or
whoever they sold their IP to, still own the
concept, patent, trademark, copyright, or whatever
related to buttons in browsers that take you up.
I have no idea if they'd pursue royalties, but
thought I'd offer implementers advice to tread
cautiously...
Google 'BrowseUp' and you'll see a few old
references to the company.
O=='=++
Your navigation is actually a tree (or a graph if you consider a page to be the same regardless of where you get there from). The conventional "Back" button goes up the tree, which is the simplest operation for going toward the root, and quite useful.
The real problem is that the conventional Back and Forward buttons, between them, don't let you traverse the entire tree, but only the right edge. There needs to be some way of getting to the other pages (for example, I'd like to take another look at the article; I can't navigate there in my history, even though it was on my screen two documents ago, nor can I get there from here without either starting from my bookmarks or losing my comment). They use a button which essentially is an "Undo" for following links.
Their results follow from the ability to access your entire history rather than only the right edge, along with using an operation that is frequently the same as the usual design (if you follow a chain of links down, and then go all the way up); this suggests that an approach which retains the regular Back button and adds an "Undo follow" button to go to the document you were on before. Since Forward is relatively rarely used, it could reverse both of these operations, depending on which you did (i.e., undo history navigation).
> They propose a system that records all pages visited.
"Good lord, man, you've invented the history list!"
Chris Mattern
If I'm browsing through a set of pages, and I go back three pages then click on another link, those three pages disappear. The problem is slightly alleviated with browser tabs, but those tend to clutter up my screen during serious surfing time.
I would argue that anyone who uses the back button *wants* those 3 pages to disappear due to errant navigation. Perhaps a toggleable setting could enable a linear history, but I bet after a while you'd end up using your tab method anyway.
(Note you can keep tab/window use down to 2 by dragging links from a desireable navigation page onto a second, but preexisting, destination page tab/window. I feel this is way more usable than any other back button functionality or options could be... and it is doable in pretty much any browser, even old ones.)
I'm looking on my IE browser now and there is a good deal of empty space on navigation bar. Instead of funkifying the works by "redesigning" the back button, why not replace it entirely with a visual representation of where you have been? A sort of scrolling bar of thumbnails, the right side being the most recent page visited, the left the oldest. Clicking on any thumbnail in that "timeline" immedietly takes you back to that page. This would eliminate the need for a forward button as well, AND stop those idiots that try and "trap" you in their site with scripting. I'd think pages in existance for less than one or two seconds (ie; pages that forward you to mainpages) would be ignored by the thumbnail timeline. Simple stuff.
[and yes, jeeniuous was a joke]
You need a FREE iPod Nano
In Netscape you can do this. Preferences -> Navigator -> "Last page Visited".
Ever get annoyed wasting time hunting for printer-friendly-print, site-search, site-map, site-feedback, contact,
What if links to these, & other such, were standard html meta values to which browsers provided standard toolbar access similar to the classic lame page print, search,
Never try that again.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
To go 'back' from whence I came on the net. 9 out of 10 people who actually use the 'back' button, use it for that purpose. What kind of research is THAT? Nice long response of little value. Perhaps if we took a poll, CowboyNeal would win, but 'back' is a retreat button, no further research necessary! Stop drinking so much beer!
Screw the back button, what I want is an intelligent forward button.
Say you're looking at the page:
http://127.0.0.1/page1.html
and then you go to the page:
http://127.0.0.1/page2.html
At that point I want the browser to request
http://127.0.0.1/page3.html
in the background. If it is availible, the forward button should become clickable and take me there.
The code could check for predictible changes between pages, and if it thinks it's found a pattern, it requests it. If the page is there, it turns on the forward button.
It could also be set up to jump to the next anchor in an HTML document, if any exist.
Life is too short to proofread.
But what a concept! A dullwitted concept, not worthy of mention anywhere, but I have fun commenting on it at every chance I get!
First Post??? Another useless concept!
Yet another solution in search of a problem.
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
The history I thought was kept separate from the back button list because it would be a pain to go through your entire history when you are looking for a page you just recently left, etc. I'm not going to say it is a bad idea though, and maybe they have a neat idea to make it work, I dunno. This reminds me. My manager told me something I'm trying to get the hang of. When I hear someone doing something stupid I'm not supposed to say anything. Then when they screw up miserably, then I tactfully present to them in writing why their idea sucked. It is much harder to do than it sounds.
Well?
If you make a change, Undo it, then make another change, the Redo functionality is gone for the first change. The first change you made is irretrievably lost. At least in most editors.
BTW the article says the Back button "accounts for 40% of all Internet clicks." This might be true for IE users who don't have tabbed browsing (and the article shows a screen shot of IE's back button). I've seen IE users find a bunch of Google matches, click on one, go back, click on the next, go back, etc. I don't see how they can stand it. (Yes they can open new windows but that can be annoying in its own way, and they usually don't.) With Mozilla's tabbed browsing I hardly ever use the back button.
Why doesn't MS add new features to IE or at least fix the bugs? Why does IE still choke when you try to open up more than 2 or 3 instances (new windows)? Why does IE choke on PDFs? Does anybody really still browse using the single window forward, back method? Does MS have anybody working on improving IE? If not, what the hell do they do up there in Redmond?
Gotcha.
You honestly believed that there might be something worthwile here?
Who the hell is always moderating funny posts as trolls? Dont you people have any sense of humor? More than likely some fool will waste their karma points moderating this post too.
Whoever wrote this needs a kick in the face.
The text makes it sound like: I visit geocities.com/~me/ and when I hit 'back' button on any normal browser it'll take me back one index page to geocities.com/ -- even if I've never been there. We all know this is not how it works.
It also makes it seem like the new idea is what we've already got. You've got to think a while before you get past the writing and it clicks.
Problem with current: I visit geocities.com/~me/ and click on 'About me', then hit 'back.' Now, I click on the slashdot link. No amount of back or forward action will get me 'About me' again.
New: What's different is when you click 'forward' in the new method, it's a tree -- there are two choices now. Which is default? I don't know. They only explain that the pull-down menu will be a tree.
Well, at least somehow, I'll get to 'About me' without having to click links and find it again.
Who the fuck uses the button anymore?
All this talk about the back button is interesting, but it seems to ignore one of the biggest failings with todays web browsers, and that is the whole page based metaphor. Now it works great for content that lends itself to it, but it sucks for the ever increasing sites that use the browser as an application front end vs a simple content reader. For anyone whose done any application creation in html/http you know what type of nightmare exists trying to keep track of user sessions and making your app "back button" proof.
What browsers need is a more robust control mechanism that allows the site to control exactly what happens when the navigation buttons are pressed. Moving around in an ecommerce site is a lot different than a message board. Now I'm not saying make it a free-for-all, but people do expect certain "logical" behaviours and many are smart enough to deal with minor shifts in absolute behaviour depending on context. This combined with other improved navigational aids (e.g. like the article, better history, etc) would make EVERYONES life easier.
Well I am.
I really don't see what these guys want to accomplish. How does "back" not really go back? The article seems to imply that "back" understands the idea of a site hierarchy and will literally only go "up" in that hierarchy (whatever that means... Toward the root of a site?):
Cockburn and his colleagues reprogrammed web browsers so that their back button was based on the order of pages, not their hierarchy
See? This just makes no sense. When I click "back", it goes to the previous page I visited. In chronological order. No "hierarchy" involved. The linked article seems to imply otherwise.
Now, if they mean that non-server content, such as the state of a running JS/Java program, or user entered data, will not persist, I can understand their point, but wouldn't *WANT* it to stay around for others to find on my machine later.
Furthermore:
The order-based back button was good at navigating between distant pages.
Now here, I've definitely missed something. How does an order-based back button make it *easier* to go between distant sites? A hierarchical button (if such a thing existed) would do that better.
Overall, either I missed something *REALLY* fundamental in what these guys did, or they did nothing and obscured that fact with lots of talk about irrelevant relational concepts. From the words they chose to use, a back button *already* behaves like what they want to change it to, and the supposed benefits of their change fit better with the behavior they claim the back button already has (which it doesn't).
As the best credit I could give them from the article, I could assume that the author completely misunderstood the research and reversed the two concepts. Thus, the research would actually have the "new" button behavior using a hierarchy of sites, rather than strict chronological behavior.
Whether the metaphor is "Back" or "Up" is immaterial if the underlying capability is the same. And that capability hasn't appeared to have changed since Mosaic. Prior to the web's commercialization, when most sites were static, the "Back" button wasn't so annoying. Moving retrospectively through too much useless crap is as much a waste of time as trying to use a browser to find something in the first place.
The "History" file won't cut it, either, because it, too, forces you to move backwards through everything.
Often, I want to move back to a specific URL I saw earlier in a session, but I don't want to bokmark it. How about allowing users to build their own breadcrumb trails?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The anti-/. effect button.
Ok, I've got nothing.
I like to use Crazy Browser. It has an option to open the page that you were viewing last session.
This is not a stand-alone browser; it uses IE's rendering engine.
(There is an effective pop-up filter built in, but it often blocks good pop-ups. I fall back on IE in these situations.)
what about the 'Forward' button. guess they should talk to Miss Cleo for that!
fsckin whatever!
do I really want a graphical display of all the porn pages I've visited recently sitting out in a tray on my browser?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I heard about programs that accomplished this very same thing nearly 3 years ago in oneof my comp sci courses, so I was a bit surprized to see it as "news" now.
Turns out I got an early scoop on it I guess, my prof for that course is one of the co-researchers listed on this page.
We were actually given links to working apps that would accomplish this behavior (which of course, I have since lost), and I'm disapointed that this article does not mention them.
"In the case of software sales, which often involve multiyear deals, a major gray area exists in determining whether to book the revenue when the deal is signed, or when some or all of the software is delivered and installed. The problem worsened during the boom, when both software and Internet companies were signing many multiyear deals ultimately ?worth? tens of millions of dollars."
L0L(tm)
"People who are compensated in options had an incentive to inflate prices," he said.
"There is a pattern here," he said, referring to company behavior. "There will be more indictments."
maybe the kingdumb will call IT, FUDux.0h0h
doesN'T l00k LIEk they're goon to be abull to call IT Lindows(TMp). that sure would have been handy. would have made a nice name used to priNT up some more phony billonly stock markup payper, to "spin" off onto trusting old J. et AL.
likely, that bullshipping(tm) co. won't go for the FUDox lowgo. has anyone heard how elmer fudd's name dilution/defamation litigation is going? he was the won whois hurt the MoSt, we think.
better a troll, than some kind of billonlyUS stock markup FraUD, i say.
What would REALLY be nice, is an entirely new function/button called "Tree View" that would include all the URL information from all the browser windows used during that session and map them to a branched tree.
Possible features might include using different colors for urls visited in different browser windows; A zoom in/out for deep detailed tree viewing; hover over a URL and get info like when you were there and for how long, etc.
I'd really love to see what my tree looks like at the end of a furious browsing session. Aside from being a practical browsing tool it could even help improve technique and shed light on surfing habits.
Maybe I could even learn not to get sidetracked so darn much.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I have not used the 'Back' button since Opera included mouse-gestures. Quite frankly, I couldn't care less what they do to that button from now on 'til doomsday.
Flash is the Herpes of the Internet.
your.opinion >
...Every time I click on it, my computer eventually crashes.
What we really need is for browsers to support a set of standard site-specific navigation buttons scriptable by Javascript. The amount of coding that goes into stateful sites to deal with users who hit the back button at "inappropriate" times is enormous -- anyone here who's coded a shopping cart will know exactly what I mean.
The benefit for the user would be a clear, standard set of buttons -- as opposed to the often confusing, overly "creative" navigation third-rate designers foist upon us -- and fewer confusing errors.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Two more for that list:
3. Quick-paste crumb trail (Win freeware)
4. Social web cockpit (commercial R&D)
you should be grateful that king william the FUDst gave US a back button to start with, & that va lairy has given US somewhere to back up to.
hobbyists. sheesh. they know nothing of being payper liesense stock markup billyunheirs.
No more and no less! Instead with MSIE, it often means to resubmit the previous page. Five or six times, I've been charged twice for something I've ordered, because I hit the back button so I could print-out a page with info about an order. It's also very slow. The previous page has already been downloaded. Don't download it again, and especially if it's a form, don't resubmit it. Just display the same thing you displayed before.
Off-topic: Microsoft's new save "complete" web page resubmits the current page. If you're on a page that displays the results from a form, it will resubmit it! Then instead of displaying, for example, a list of the items you ordered, it either displays a warning that it's a duplicate or submits the order again!z
*ducks*
I am not going to read an article about a redesign of a common, useful item on a site with half the screen wasted!
Whatever moron designs these pages that a) scroll horizontally and/or b) leave a HUGE swath of screen real estate unused, especially one like the article linked that has TEENY TINY print should get a job flipping burgers.
How can a site like that be any kind of authority on design?
-steve mcgrew
mcgrew.info
theFragfest.com
I jus had an idea to think of something like this to get paid to work on instead of the stuff i do right now...i'd have more fun...maybe i'll look into making linux look like windows (yes that was sarcasm)
Though this is supposed to be a "funny" post, what you're suggesting is exactly the problem. The back button functions perfectly fine. It's the forward button that needs work.
Programmers simply need to rethink the history of page clicks as a tree instead of a stack. Navigation back on a tree always takes you to a root. It is at that point when the user should have the option of selecting different branches that have occured. For example:
1. Start at Yahoo
2. Read a news article
3. Go back to main page
4. Go to Slashdot
Now, at this point, if you hit the BACK button, it should take you to Yahoo. When there, however, the FORWARD button should offer you the choice of jumping to the article you read, or going to slashdot. That would solve the problem nicely. Except, if you do a lot of browsing, that dynamic tree could get awfully big in memory.
You know, I've never had any problems with IE resubmitting things. It has always clearly asked me "Do you want to submit this form data again?" and if I tell it to, it'll do that, just like one would expect.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
Umm.. no, unless you want to redefine terminology, up would move you up a folder on a web server, like the 'up' feature on konqueror.
The back button system may have its problems, but it is far from incorrectly named.
for these hired goons.
terrific. happy gnu year. very merry. fud on.
How bout they change the way the R button works so when pressed it prints an E I'm forrvrr doing this and wrll I don't srr why this shouldn't br a top priority
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
So it seems that you think the back button should behave as "undo" does. I can see that.
I rarely go back so it doesent matter much to me, but I think when I do sometimes I am surprised because back in my brain is not always what the button wants to do.
Surf to a page, click back a couple times and then click a link on the page you're looking at. Now, you can't get 'back' to the pages you looked at before you hit the back button.
It's really irritating. In order to get around it, you need to open a new window, which clutters up your desktop.
Perhaps a better back button would mean a lot less windows open for experianced surfers.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
IE has an annoying habit of clearing the text boxes of a page when I get a timed out page and hit the 'back' button, say when posting to /. (slower than ever!?)
Yeah, but that only seems to happen on slashdot. It's really fucking annoying. I think it has something to do with the way caching is set up.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's called either CZWeb or Thoughtscape, depending on whether you are talking about the research or commercialized version.
As for the back button thing, it has already been done as well.
Remember that the first browsers didn't have a drop-down list on the back/forward buttons. It took those amazing innovators in Redmond to come up with that. Was the back button "broke"? I guess not. But being able to jump back several pages at once is very useful. Some people don't use it....fine. I do -- all the time. Thank you for fixing something that wasn't broke, Microsoft (and thank you netscape/mozilla/every other browser for copying that feature).
I would definitely prefer some sort of tree to be available in the drop-down. If it confuses those who don't get it, make it a preference for advanced users (but I doubt those who don't understand it use the drop-down anyway). But I am regularly frustrated by the lack of an easy way to navigate to a page I was just at, because the back button (with or without the drop-down) is linear, while my history is a tree.
BTW, the one reason I still use IE is that it's "open in new window" offers a kludgy workaround....since it allows "branching" of the history from that point. Mozilla based browsers all do the particularly useless action of simply opening a new browser with the default page and no history. (ok, its not useless, but it is the exact same thing as what you get if you just click on the mozilla icon)
If Back truly went back to the previous page viewed, instead of using a tree, as it currently does, wouldn't this just put you in an infinite loop between two pages? I view page #1, then page #2, then page #3. I click Back, which brings me from page #3 to page #2. Now, if I click Back again, wouldn't it just bring be back to page #3. Obviously, they've come up with a better algorithm than simply displaying the previous page viewed, but it sure seems counterintuitive to me.
Can anybody explain to me why the "Forward" button can't be set to a location by a page author? If I'm reading a 10 page article it would sure make sense so use the Forward button instead of clickomg some tiny "Next page" link at the bottom of the article.
Well?
If I see more than one link on a page that I am likely to follow(e.g. /. homepage) I simply middle-click the links to open them in a new tab.
This solves the problem of whiping out a branch when going back because each tab has an independant history.
A forest of really thin trees(stacks) is much better than a single stack.
It seems the tree structure and "sideways navigation" are not such new ideas, and there's a nice feature in Phoenix which relates to this: opening all pages of a bookmark folder in tabs.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Usability experts should live by this rule: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Crap flood. It significantly decreases the signal/noise ratio. It's not funny either.
> Just because it isn't broke doesn't mean it can't be fixed.
> Windows is universally understood
Windows is nothing like as universally understood as the back button.
The back button is the only successful application of DWIM that I've
ever seen; it consistently does exactly what users want it to do. 90
year-old people who don't have a computer at home and are afraid to
put more than one finger on the mouse at once understand the back
button the first time it is explained in a single sentence, and they
never forget what it does. (I teach introductory computer classes at
a public library.) Windows is *nothing* like that. The start menu
can be explained twenty times to some of these people, and they never
get it.
The list of computer things people understand as well as the back
button is _very_ short. Off the top of my head, I can think of
the bold B button for making text bold in word processors, and
that's about it -- and even that runs into trouble when they aren't
sure which text it applies to; nobody ever wonders which page the
back button will effect.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
The OS/2 web map was apparently the first to have this structure. It was just an html page generated by wrapping the history links in html. I imagine it took about twenty minutes to implement, although the tree-structured history infrastructure is a bit more work.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
If it is a stack then, shouldn't going back be like removing the top item and getting one "down" below it?
Or are we going to just start calling it the "pop" button?
Doesn't he mean "down" the stack? /Twinkle
The poster brings up a very good point. After reading this, I agree that changing the forward button would be a better solution. Though I think that expanding menus would NOT be the solution. I can't tell if the parent is for this idea ("it could be adequately implemented") or against it ("this is a UI pain-in-the-ass"). I'm not sure what the ideal solution is, but my impression now is that it would involve some sort of tree control as a sidebar and a switchable option between the current style forward button and on that lists all the children of the node which corrosponds to the site you're currently at.
"BACK" is actually like "UNDO". And to those who have understood it that way already, if your undo's included all your undo's, then you will be going back to where you specifically decided you did not want to go.
That is why when I make a back button for a page, I choose to use javascript to go back, and not a link to the page they supposably came from (links should read HOME, or TOP, or anything but BACK). I get quite annoyed with back buttons that go forward and conceptually disagree with the browser's back button.
So is the "back" they describe better? Well, maybe they could have two buttons, or a choice, but I would definitely defend the practicality of the current version.
And I doubt it's going anywhere.
I think it's better to see all levels of the tree at once, because the navigational structure obstructs the information desired. That's why we use search engines instead of chasing 2000 links in a row to find what we want. One branch of the tree may take one link to get a topical page; another may take five or ten, with the intermediate nodes having little or no information.
Ideally, one could have different views: chronological (a preorder traversal of the tree), tree, sorted, searched, etc.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
BACK button redesigns YOU!
Ok, the back button is SUPPOSED TO TAKE YOU to the last page you visited... and IT DOES! When you go back, you loose the branch that you were just on though.
d u/linux/
I get arround this by spawning a new window.
The tree is copied to a new browser.
If you don't want to do that, Whooptee doo. Just use the HISTORY instead, witch you are ofcourse just implementing in a slightly better way (arguably)
The use of the word UP is innappropirate, becuase it is already used for going up directory levels.
If I click an "up" button,
I expet to go from:
cub.wsu.edu/linux/projects/
to
cub.wsu.e
Up and down were arbitrarily chosen.
Down makes more sence to me as going back in time on a tree...(towards the trunk) and up makes more sence to go forward in the time tree (go out to the branches) would be more appropriate a word, yet... I hate all of these stupid up, down, left for counter clockwize etc.
So, if you want to choose the unchosen arrow direction for your little project, choose down. Do NOT choose up, our you could just use that sundial that IE uses.
-AP
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
It was in their now archaic web browser on OS/2 called WebExplorer. The one cool thing it had was a graphical history diagram in a 'tree' format showing every page you visited. Something like 'history' as it showed where you had been, but *different* because it also showed how you got there. It was shown as a web page with clickable links.
I did rue the loss of this one feature, and since then Netscape 3.x, 4.x, and now Mozilla runs on OS/2. And none of them (or the windows browsers) had a page like this.
I just submitted this as a feature enhancement to mozilla... everybody that likes this idea, go vote for this bug #187187:
7
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18718
You'll probably have to copy and paste that URL into your browser, I think bugzilla blocks people coming straight from slashdot.
"And like that
I don't think that integrating more functionality into the back button is a good idea. A history is fine, at least you might expect what to get this way, even though there is an occasional small hickup.
:)
I guess I'll just be considered as against progress
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
It's usually greyed out. It'd be useful if it always worked as it could make surfing really efficient.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Hehe.. I have found my new .sig
"You kiwis keep the hell away from my desktop."
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. it's the only thing that ever has.
How dare you take the pre-Umbilist position about BELLY BUTTONS? Every KNOWS that GOD did not create BELLY BUTTONS! These unspeakable signs of SIN -- they cannot appear without ABOMINABLE fornication -- formed when MAN fell from the GRACE of GOD by eating a BREAST-SHAPED FRUIT. You will BURN in HELL forever!
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Click here to test!
Is to filter what site shows in my back button.
Am I the only one who's annoyed by a "doubleclick.net" link in my history whereever I go?
and I think we'll both agree to call it innovative.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
I hate when I respond to something I think I understand, and then find out I didn't.
I stand by my point: It doesn't effect your back button. Not because these are links, but because these link tags affect a different set of buttons. If you don't like what the site is doing to your "Site Navigation Bar", use your back button to get out of it.
haha the guys name is cockburn
thats gotta suck
I cannot wait to have a better functioning back button! Every day that damn thing only takes me 'back' one page. I want one that takes me back to this page I visited six years ago; they stopped paying the web host fees, but I DONT CARE. I can't wait for the new back buttons. Oh, and while they're at it, I think an awesome idea would be a mouse with a button on the side, for your thumb or something, that incorporates this new 'back' technology with a click of mouse button, to save valuable wrist moving time from this pixel to the upper left of my screen. I can't wait!!
I'd like a time-limited version of bookmarks. If you stumble across a site, you can say "Remember this." A few days later, your software asks you "Do you really want to remember these web pages?" - and if you say you do, they get moved to your bookmarks / favourites. I you don't, they get deleted.
Opera 7 already has part of this feature: Fast Forward. When you go forward to a page that has a Next page defined, the Forward button changes to a different icon which takes you to the next page.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
This problem is specific case of a more general problem. Going backwards and forwards is basically undoing and re-doing actions. Any undo/redo system has the same problem.
The problem is that while the solution is obvious (store all the commands as a tree), both the UI and user models suck. How are you going to show the structure? How are most users going to mentally model some sequence like "A, B, C, undo, D, E, undo, undo, redo C, F, undo, redo D, redo E, G, H, I"? (You may need to draw that to see what I mean, which is exactly my point; even techies don't think this way. (Yet.))
In fact I intend to find out whether people can understand this in the most direct way possible, which will be to implement it in my project and see what happens. I have no idea if people will be able to understand it. (It happens in my case that the project naturally fits into this anyhow, so it's worth a try.)
In the meantime, the current model (undoing a few things and then doing something else completely destroys the remaining redo list) has the virtue of simplicity, something that no other proposal, including the one in this article, can have over the current system. I suspect that the current system is the best choice if we can't have the full tree-based implementation.
ive been wanting this for years!
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
Its basically the same thing as in mozilla, but ie just lists the sites you've visited, and doesn't put the sites into folders.
.
I like the ie implementation of history better
That being said, I like the tabbed browsing of mozilla. I guess if I had a spare week I could rewrite part of mozilla.
Sigh.. Why does software never work beautifully..
I agree with you! I guess the moderators don't. Why would they disagree with the concept that a back button should be ... gasp ... a back button?
It only does that when you hit the reload button. What happens when you hit the back button? It will often do it without asking!
"Gesture Navigation: An Alternative `Back' for the Future" Umm, if by "the future" they mean "Opera 5 and up."
Again, my IE has never resubmitted any form unless it asked me if I wanted it to. I don't know what yours is doing, maybe it's an option that I didn't want to check.
-D [lazy to log in]
Its been a looonnnggg time, but as I recall Hypercard automatically created a thumbnail history tree as you browsed through a stack.
I've always wondered why their isn't an equivalent button on my browser which could instantly show a drop down menu of the last 20 pages or so and let me choose one by clicking on the *picture* (with optional titling of course) of the page I want.
They point to the fact that the current "Back" is more of an "Up" in a stack of pages.
If by "up" they mean down. Or perhaps they enqueue things on the bottom of their stack.
Back and Forward in the browser behave *exactly* like Undo and Redo. This is a very familiar and easy to follow paradigm. Muck with it and I guarantee you'll get unexpected and unintuitive results.
Word has a separate redo button, much like Mozilla has a separate forward button. To have undo undo something, with the next undo REDOING something, is a completely broken interface.
Broken interfaces ruin any enjoyment I get from computing.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Back a long time ago, I was using OS2/Warp... I had three web browsers... The native Netscape, inside the windows 3.1 emulation, a copy of IE that I actually purchased (what a dipshit I was), and IBM's WebExplorer, IIRC. WebExplorer had a history function that would fill your screen with a tree of visited pages. It was a wonderful thing. I thought it would catch on, but nobody's done it, since. If any of the Konqueror coders are reading, do you do feature requests?
main(){char I,l,O[]={'-',1-1,0,(1<<5)-1,0+'-',-10-1,-10,11-0,
i had a great idea once. i called it a "jump to conclusions mat." you have all these conclusions on this mat, and you take a jump...
E.g. if you browse through the following pages in that order by only clicking links in the pages but not the back button of the browser: /, /a, /a/1, /a, /, /b, /, /c
then the current back button will let you go back through all those pages in reverse order.
I you would have used the back button for navigating through those pages wherever it can be used, there would be only the opetion to go back to "/" from c, nothing else.
If the browser manages to more clearly identify chierarchical moves (ie clicking on a link that really brings you back to where you come from), then the navigation could be done with dedicated buttons for both hierarchical and historical navigation. Given the above example, a browser that would truly detect hierarchical browsing would *not* let you go through all the visited pages even if you used links. It would show exactly the same behavior after you use the links as if you would have used the back button to navigate.
*Then* an additional back button for going back the full list of pages would make sense.
An additional complication for pure hierarchical browsing is of course that it can lead to counter intuidive situations: if you start at /a/b/c and click the "home" button to come to "/", then the
hierarchical "up" button will lead you back to "/a/b/c".
Nice dummy group, NSA. What are your real mot
*** NO CARRIER
While Opera is not unique in its abilities to open links in new windows, it has many features which make this a very efficient way to navigate pages. On a page like slashdot, I open each new link in a new window. Like this, my navigation becomes more like a tree, which is more natural and reflects the nature of the internet a bit better. A better browsing metaphor based on this idea would be great.
samrolken
In Soviet Russia the back button redesigns YOU!
Just want to throw in a note about HistoryTree, a 2D tree-based history manager plugin I released in 1996. It solved the Back Button issue.
/ /s martbrowser.com/
s ts/04 _04_97_2.shtml
s ters/710/hg.h tml
http://web.archive.org/web/19961223200819/http:
Old review at:
http://www.webreview.com/1997/04_04/strategi
For info on more navigation tools and techniques from this ancient era, check out this paper from the WWW6 conference:
http://www.scope.gmd.de/info/www6/po
-Matt Jensen
I rarely use the back button myself.... I open nearly every link in a new window. by the end of a browsing session, I usually have at least a dozen explorer windows open. that sounds like the same kind of functionality as the back-button you propose, except instead of going through a "history" of all the pages I've viewed, I get to switch windows.
...in three or four sentences what the academics in this paper failed to explain in several paragraphs. Short sentences, at that.
/. Perhaps I should choose a more authoritative forum.
The truth is that both of the behaviors are useful. And they are not mutually exclusive. I have proposed for some time the following compromise:
The Back button should retain its current behavior. This is an easily understood behavior which makes sense to most of us. The Alt-Left-Arrow shortcut should also be retained. When the user goes Back using either method and starts another branch by clicking on another link (or typing in a URL or using a bookmark or any other method), the entire history should be recorded (not just the current branch).
But the logical data structure to record it is not a longer stack with multiple duplicate pages in it (which seems to be the suggestion of the authors of this paper). The logical structure for such data is a tree (implemented as a hash of hashes or whatever). And the logical way of accessing other branches of the tree is by means of the Alt-Up-Arrow and Alt-Down-Arrow key combinations. In other words, Alt-Up-Arrow would take you to the previous branch of the tree. The logical position on that branch would either be the end of the branch or the same level of depth as the user's position on the current branch.
This might be a little confusing for those who use the Back button rather than the Alt-Left-Arrow. But the logical place to put the interface for them would be in the drop-down menu for histories next to the Forward and Back buttons. We know how to display trees as indented lists. We know how to condense them with plus-or-minus boxes. This would have the added benefit of helping people to understand the lists as trees, thus enabling them to better understand the Alt-Up-Arrow and Alt-Down-Arrow options.
Alt-Up-Arrow should go back to the most recent branch point and continue through the various branches starting from the most recently created branch. Repeated presses of Alt-Up-Arrow should continue to explore the branches which start from that branch point. When those are exhausted, further Alt-Up-Arrow presses would explore earlier branch points. When the user has exhausted all previous branches, further presses of Alt-Up should cycle through to the most recent branch at the most recent branch point. Alt-Down-Arrow should produce the inverse of this cycle (i.e., start with the oldest branch at the oldest branch point if Alt-Up has not been used previously).
Alt-Left-Arrow and Alt-Right-Arrow can thus be seen as moving further in and further out on the current branch. Alt-Right should choose the most recently visited branch if the current node is a branch point (mirroring its current behavior). The Back button and the Forward button should continue to duplicate this behavior.
I've suggested this before on
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
So it was a learning experience all around. :o)
I've been waiting for someone to say that. I'd mod you up if I had the points. I wish there was some way to do this, so that when I'm in the middle of a long string of Undo/Redo commands (to, say, get some text that I erased a while ago) I don't have to be extra-careful not to type anything or risk losing all my redo buffer.
I believe they're called mouse gestures.
I imagine people using ten-year old browsing techniques like physically moving the mouse onto a big button as a caveman hitting a target with a big club. It could be just me though.
No one has ever fired for blaming Microsoft.
I've seen a lot of things on Slashdot, but seeing the first post modded redundant is simply ridiculous. :)
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Why waste the scrolltime/keystrokes to navigate through back/forward menus, when you could just middle click a new window for any page you know you'll probably be going back to.
I almost never left click when browsing.
Middle-click for new window. Alt-F4 when done with it.
Magius_AR
Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport that requires
you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers
wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly
spring up in the middle of the machine room.
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