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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!
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
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).
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
Does anybody remember the OS/2 Warp (3.0) system web browser?
...
I do.
It had a complete Web page showing all the links and hyper links that you visited.
The first page was at the root level, then each link from that page was nested, with each subsequent link nested in turn. Each link was shown with the page title and was a link so you could re-visit that page.
After a few hours it was interesting to see your browsing process. First you were here, then you went there, and there, and
I miss that feature. It showed Web browsing in a non-linear fashion.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Ditto; it was a tree structure stored as an html page.
One could save an entire session just by bringing up the tree in a browser window and saving it. That meant that, for instance, one could work through search results or links on a page one-by-one, hitting "back" one each page, and end up with a storable record of everything visited.
Those were the days, when web browsing was considered something more than a Markov process.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
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