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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."
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
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.
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!
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
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!
"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!!!!!!!!!!!
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!
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
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.
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
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
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.
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?
Big Deal. They can change it all they want, but my dad still won't be able to figure it out.
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
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
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.
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...
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
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
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.
Ok, first, ignoring your ignorant claim that it can be done in 20 minutes (it would need at least 2 days of QA testing, not to mention tonnes of time in beta), the research is not regarding the code, its regarding the user experience. I can clone the start menu from Windows XP with relatively little effort, but had I actually had to design the Windows XP start menu from scratch, it would have taken a crap load of research. Sure the code is easy, it's the design, and more importantly the human element that is important. If people don't find the menu intuitive they won't use it. Same goes for this 'new' back functionality. Obviously you are thinking about this from the point of view of a code monkey. If everyone were to think like that, computers would still be hard to use for the masses.
So to answer your question, it is research because they are researching how people use the existing back button, what users want the back button to do, what they actually do with it, and how to change the back button to make the majority of internet users happier with it's functionality.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
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.
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
Most users don't give a fuck about the Back button. They use once in a while. Hell if you took the back button out most users wouldn't even know it was gone. And when they do use the back button, it's not to go back 10 or 20 times but maybe 1 or 2.
2 days of QA testing? Maybe, if you wanted to get a test group to see what they thought of it.
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.)
In Netscape you can do this. Preferences -> Navigator -> "Last page Visited".
Oh yeah, I'm not saying that this study is suggesting something really novel, or even necessarily needed. All they are really talking about is integrating a true history into the back button. It's way overdone.
Personally I'd like to be able to get my true chronological history using alt+ -, instead of opening the history window and trying to remember where exactly I was, but I agree with the poster who said that this is pretty far down the list of needed features for browsers.
But the cool thing is that it should be a fairly trivial hack to add to Mozilla.
I finally get it!
;-)
(Score:5, Troll) = Stupid question, needs to be answered
(No Offense KaltKalt) I wish my stupid remarks had value.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Never try that again.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Funny that you look at that as a problem. I think the same thing is a virtue.
If I want this discussion to be in my foward/backwardness I would click the big slashdot in the top left. If I do not I click the back button. I personally want to be able to get to the previous sight I viseted in as few backs possible (usually around 3). It were setup the way you want it could easily be 12 or more after going on slashdot. After every 0 coment I choose to read it will set me back even further. Sometimes I like to read the spicif mods on a post, again more things in my history. If every page in my history was in the back button que that would be very bad.
I fI were to decide I was too lazy to check spelling ect. (I am) and that I would be ashamed to post in such a state (I am not), and therefore aborted this comment, I would have all sorts of crap that was worthless in my back button que (I still will, but at least it will have been somethomething).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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!
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.
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]
There's information in the HTML spec to indicate what the next and previous pages will be. Mozilla uses this information to prefetch the page for you during times when nothing else is using the bandwidth. What I would like to see is it either change the back and forward buttons to use the next and previous links, or have the buttons appear somewhere else.. as opposed to searching for the next and prev buttons on pages that might move due to different banner ads and scrolling and shit.
Why does IE still choke when you try to open up more than 2 or 3 instances (new windows)?
It doesn't.
Why does IE choke on PDFs?
It doesn't.
Does anybody really still browse using the single window forward, back method?
Sure, when it's more convenient than opening new windows.
Does MS have anybody working on improving IE?
Yes, and they do that. The problem is that you're expecting them to "improve" it in such a way that lets you use the latest version of their browser with bunches of features on your stone-age computer. You're already using a version of IE which doesn't normally crash with tonnes of windows open, you just have no RAM. 16MB is enough to keep it stable, and there's no reason at all to have a computer with less than that. Hell, I have a Dreamcast with more RAM than that.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
*ducks*
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.
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.
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.
> 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
>
>[link HREF="magic-cauldron-3.html" REL=next]
> [link HREF="magic-cauldron-1.html" REL=previous]
> [link HREF="magic-cauldron.html#toc2" REL=contents]
Huh? The way I read it, I see:
[link HREF="big_ad_page.html" REL=next]
[link HREF="big_ad_page.html" REL=previous]
[link HREF="big_ad_page.html" REL=contents]
With "big_ad_page.html" being "Hah! You thought disabling Javashit could disable popups and interstitials! Thanks to 'standars', all your back button are belong to us!"
Most users don't give a fuck about the Back button. They use once in a while. Hell if you took the back button out most users wouldn't even know it was gone. And when they do use the back button, it's not to go back 10 or 20 times but maybe 1 or 2.
Do you have proof to back up your claim? I'm not disputing your observation, but without proof, it's just an opinion. If you actually got data to show as proof of your 'opinion', then you have just conducted research (gathering data). So even though the actual research is on a subject that appears very narrow, possibly with little to gain from the results, it is still data gathered to help show usage patterns, and is used by this group to attempt to modify the functionality, thus changing, and hopefully optimizing the general usage patterns.
Waste of time? No. Revolutionary? Hell no. Necessary? Yes, at the very least we can use their research to help disprove your 'opinion', that the average user wouldn't even notice the back button was missing.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Really?
- www.slashdot.com [sic]
- www.yahoo.com
- www.msn.com
Here are the algorithmic rules applied:1. Every time you click a direct link (or type in address bar, et al), you move "down" in the heirarchy
2. Every time you hit the back button, you move back up in the heirarchy. The problem is that you can't see multiple items at the same level with the back button -- which is what they're trying to solve.
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
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.
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
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.
Common misunderstanding - but the article is confusing.
They are comparing 'back' in the sense of 'undo' with 'back' in the sense of browser history. Nothing to do with directory hierarchies.
The assumption (and a valid assumption) is that you'll be using IE on a system that supports it. Windows 95 has a perfectly good version of IE, and requires very little RAM to run. If you want to use an older OS, get a browser that doesn't crash with it. If you want to use a newer browser on a newer OS, you'll have to have a reasonable amount of RAM so that the OS doesn't crash (192MB keeps my WinXP beautifully stable, if a bit slow with memory-intensive apps and games)
Asking for them to make newer versions of IE run on your hardware is like asking Rockstar to port GTA: Vice City to the Atari 2600.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
This little gem can only come from someone who has never done any usability testing at all.
And when they do use the back button, it's not to go back 10 or 20 times but maybe 1 or 2.
Really? And how do you know this very handy fact? Did you read it somewhere? Did you do your own well planned usability test? Or did you simply pull it out of your ass?
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.
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.
I've never done much testing of any kind.
Pulled it out of my ass thanks.
I have no proof to back it up. It's just from observation and talking with other people. It's an opinion more or less but it somewhat has a foundation.
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.
Oops. I thought it was funny, but a mod like that reminds me to be more a) CLEAR in meaning and verbage and b) must be OVERLY funny or OVERLY sarcastic, or use some sort of emoticon to insure that the correct meaning and inference is understood.
:)
The moderators get my meaning about 99.9% of the time, so every once in a while we get our wires crossed. Just a part of slashdot.
I'll take my -1 TROLL and keep my head high (and try to be more precise in the future).
The FUNNY part of the story (and I can see how it's trolled) is that the article dicusses, to use a pun, things we can't turn back, like an AOL CD. And, of course, explaining the joke now is really, really not funny.
I haven't moderated, but I assume that the inference, pognancy, and meaning can often be conveyed in different ways. Unless of course of a first post
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
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..
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.
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.
You'd be suprised at what you find when work with real people, instead of pulling things out your ass ;)
..probably because the "Discussion About the Back Button" is no longer in the same tree as the path that led you to the "Microsoft Hates Self" discussion.
I don't see how ANYONE could consider this logical at all. You follow a path, from one link to the next. Why would you expect that a link from 1->3 should bring you from 3->2 when you press Back? That's the most unintuitive behavior I've ever heard of, and it doesn't apply ANYWHERE in society. Think of maps, driving directions, a paper book, a filing cabinet.
In any case, Mozilla has this feature, and does exactly what you want, if you click the little "down arrow" next to Mozilla's back button. A dropdown menu of all the pages you've been to will be presented.
You just answered your own question. "type in", does not begin creating a tree of events to record. Consider this:
You can't, because you don't have a LINK from one to the other. "Back" implies a path that includes at least two points, not one.
I think your perception of what the back button should do is a bit flawed.
Funny, I've been using this in Mozilla for at least a year, maybe more. It's been a built-in for awhile. Click the little down-arrow on your Forward button or Back button when you have a history in there. Works like a champ.
This whole Back button discussion is a non-issue.
Well, just buy a good mouse then. It's a nice feature. My Kensington does it.
-mike
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
Criminy! Gimme a frickin' break!
ALTERNATE INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE NEAR-CRIMINALLY NITPICKY
1. Create a web page www.bozo.com/index.html with links to www.yahoo.com and www.msn.com. Spend big-bucks to rent a server on rackspace to host my 1337 paradigm-shattering pagX0rz.
2. Lather, rinse, repeat my original instructions using the web page to type in the URLs for you.
If you really have that big a problem with the way the back button works, fine. Just make sure you leave an option so I can switch the behavior back to "broken" and we can all be happy.
BTW, It's pretty lame to accuse me of not understanding how the stupid 'back' button works. You are apparently not able to correlate the similarities between a clicked link and a typed-in URL. How weak is that?!?!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
....2
../
1
..\
...\
....3
See above. If you are on page 1, a page of links, or a URL you typed into a browser window, and then follow a link from page 1 to page 2, and then hit "Back", you are returned to page 1 (as expected).
If you now go from page 1 to page 3, and hit "Back", you are suggesting that somehow there should be a way to get back to page 2? That's just silly, because you never went from page 2 to page 3 to create a relationship between 2 and 3.
Sigh... *You* still don't understand. I get what you're saying, I just think the proposed alteration is superfluous. There **IS** a way to get from page 2 to page 3 - it's called the browser history. Altering the back button behavior to browse the whole history is redundant.
Furthermore, let's say you do 'back-button' to a node (like #1 above) with several branches. If you 'forward-button' again, which branch do you take? Do you display a menu? Do you take the most recently retreaded path? If so, then you're in the same boat.
It seems to me the problem you have is not with the 'back' button, but the 'forward' button.
What *I* would find useful is adding an alternate page-history view to the browser to display it in a tree-format rather than a flat list, but that has nothing to do with the 'back' button.
Look, we are just going to have to agree that we want it to work two different ways. Please, let's end this so we can get back to something more productive than arguing about back-button behavior.
We can *both* do more damage if we split up.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
...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 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.