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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."
Each press of it takes you back to where you were. The same is true for the IE style Explorer windows, where there is also an "Up" button available. Each functions as you would expect.
If they really want to do some work with back buttons, sort out the problems with frames and scripted web pages first!
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.
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.
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
Exactly. Read Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee for a good explanation of the origins of the WWW. A lot of the Web as we know it is a hacked version of Berners-Lee's original vision and intent. People weren't willing to make client programs text editors, so the Web became a publishing medium viewed with a browser instead of the interactive medium it was intended to be. It would be easy to display your browsing history as a hierarchy or as a link web, but it would probably take up more space on your screen. Display space is at a premium. (I wish Mozilla would let me interactively resize the tab buttons, for instance. They take up too much space.)
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?
Also, as a previous poster pointed out, the back button also works unintuitively (compared to, say, the standard edit menu Undo function) when you browse to a new page from a page to which you've clicked back (works more like a tree than a chain in that case).
Check out the fast forward button in Opera 7. If it detects a "next" button on the page your looking at (ex. Google search results) it detects that and allows you to jump to it. I'm not sure if it pre-fetches or not. Kind of neat.
I was going to post a similar comment.
You're totally right about the functionality required. The problem I see here is user interface. While a tree diagram is quite easy to follow, a tree similar to the file browser one does take up rather a lot of space.
Thinking about it, I tend to use Mozilla's tabs as a means to launch several links from the same page, which allows me to flick thhough them, and return. This allows most of the functionality, but it does get confusing remembering where the pages were linked from. Perhaps what we need is a nested tabs view or something.
Ok, shoot me for replying to myself, but I thought about it more and it occurred to me that the best UI tool isn't a explorer-style tree, but a multiple-level menu--similar to existing back-menus, but branched:
BACK BUTTON ^
Page3 (last visited) | page4 (linked from page3)
| page5 (linked from page3)
| page6 (linked from page3)
Page2 (linked from page1)
Page1 (started here)
You are currently on page7, linked from page3. As you can see, it only branches when the back button is hit on page4,5 or 6, and you choose another link on page3. So back-button behavior is preserved, but enhanced to prevent information (clicked link) loss.
Too bad the article was not more clear about the problem they were trying to solve, or on what their solution was for that matter.
I've always had *another* idea of what the back button might do. Originally most web sites were organized in a somewhat linear fashion, like a book. The top page would have a list of links and you could think of these links as "Chapters". Once you skipped to a chapter, you might page forward in the chapter and finally might transition naturally to the next chapter.
I always thought it would be nice if each page had linking information built into it indicating what the next logical "page" would be as well as the previous logical page. The forward and back buttons would use *that* information first, and only if that information was not available would it go "up" by going back to a page in your history.
With such a system in place, a Google search on "homeschooling" might take me into the center of an article on the general topic of education. Using the forward and back buttons I could visit the entire site in the order the author had intended.
Come to think of it, I think there used to be HTML tags to alter the normal back and forward function, but they were more often used incorrectly, and I haven't seen sites use them much lately.
If the researchers will concentrate on changing the HTML specifications to add sensible tags in this area I'm sure the browsers will follow. Just convincing Micrososft to change the way the buttons work is the wrong way to go.
I think perhaps the button with the problem isn't the back button, but the forward button. Consider:
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
Note: the forward button is active
4) Click on the link to the discussion about Microsoft being its own worst enemy.
5) Now try to use your back button...
The forward button is active again.
The problem isn't with the back button. Its that the forward button doesn't give you options. This can be implemented by considering each website a node in a tree structure. As you visit a hyperlink you go up the tree. When you click back, you go down the tree one step. Forward will bring you up the tree again, but will pick a default unless you specify which branch to follow (to be implemented).
The only problem is that the forward button is typically implemented so that it gives you a list of items to pick so that if you hit back 3 times, you would see the 3 web pages you just visited in reverse order in the list. I think it could be adequately implemented with expanding menus (but this is a UI pain-in-the-ass!).
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
I don't think it has anything to do with going "up in the heirarchy" to the slashdot main page on any web site.
1. type in www.slashdot.com
2. type in www.yahoo.com
3. hit back
4. type in www.msn.com
Now, try to get to www.yahoo.com using the back button. See? Same thing, no site organization or heirarchies involved anywhere.
Rather, the problem is that the back and forward buttons move you within a linear chain of pages independent of the sites they are on. If you go back in that chain and then type in a new URL, you've truncated off the tail end of that chain and replaced it with the new page.
I've been aware of this effect or years, but I never considered it a problem that required a solution.
Methinks the researchers doth smokest too mucheth. That or they're desperate for more researchbucks(TM).
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
This really exists:
Mozilla has an "up, next, previous, first, last, etc" set of buttons that you can use to browse an ordered set of pages. go to the magic cauldron for an example. The html listed below makes this work and (i believe...) is part of the html 4 standard.
[link HREF="magic-cauldron-3.html" REL=next]
[link HREF="magic-cauldron-1.html" REL=previous]
[link HREF="magic-cauldron.html#toc2" REL=contents]
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.
Try using the down arrow, next to the back button. Unlike Netscrape/Mozilla where that is identical to the top level "go", in Phoenix, the down arrow does what you want, and the Go menu does what this article suggests is good. The best of both worlds!
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001