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."

Comments

Re:already have it

[jd142]

No, I don't think you do. Try the following:

1) Go to the Slashdot main page at http://slashdot.org

2) Go to the discussion about the back button.

3) Click your back button and go back to the main page

4) Click on the link to the discussion about Microsoft being its own worst enemy.

5) Now try to use your back button to get back to the discussion about the back button. On both Mozilla 1.2.1 and IE 6, that piece of data is gone. You go back to the slashdot main page and then back to the site you visited before slashdot. It is a feature I've been annoyed with for awhile.

At the end of the day, I can't just hit alt+- and revisit every page I've been to.

Why is it gone? Because you went "up" in the directory hierarchy to the main slashdot page and so it erased the back button discussion.

I can get to the page in the history of course. And as I read the article, that's really what they are talking about (at least as I understood it): integrating the history into the back button so that you can more easily retrace your steps.

At least that's what I think they are talking about.

The article poorly explains things

[Randolpho]

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.