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:WHY?

[ez76]

The average web browser's "back" feature is almost the only software feature in existence that is universally understood, and works as advertised

This ceases to be true once you throw cache-controlling headers (which force a refresh on many browsers) into the mix. For example, on banking sites (and other sites that want transactional semantics), the Back button will often force a reload if your browser honors "Pragma: no-cache" or "Cache-control" headers.

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).

Re:already have it

[cmacb]

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.

Re:already have it

[Aglassis]

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!).

Re:already have it

[Asprin]

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).

Re:Didn't OS/2 Warp have this?

[RetroGeek]

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.