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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.
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!
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!!!!!!!!!!!
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.
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
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 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
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.
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).
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
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
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.
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