Building a Better Back Button

Justin Macfarlane writes "From Stuff: 'Net surfers use the back button more than any other key. A computer scientist has made the command more useful, writes Will Harvie.'"

Comments

Next week on /.

[mschoolbus]

Building a better back better back button!

Entropy

[Pac]

Are we now losing energy at every interaction? Are duplicates suffering entropic information loss? I am just asking this because last year this same story was much better.

The ultimate back button.

[nesneros]

If I hit back enough do I end up using NCSA Mosaic? Or do I just end up in gopher?

Dupe, dupe, dupe, dupe of Earl, Earl, Earl

[EvilBuu]

If within half an hour of posting a story thirty readers have identified the story as a dupe, there must be some way the /. eds could just run submissions through a filter to detect dupes or not. 'Cause they sure ain't catching them on their own.

Re:Dupe, dupe, dupe, dupe of Earl, Earl, Earl

[Ratface]

It's almost like they need a special button or something. It could be called the "Back" button perhaps! ;-)

The Power Of Goat

[Big Mark]

I use Phoenix and the mouse gestures plugin; this means I end up using the "open in new tab", "change tab" and "close tab" mouse gestures almost exclusively.

However, there is also a "go back" gesture, quite possibly the simplest of them all, and do you want to know what site caused me to use this quick escape?

Goatse!

Now, that's one back button I don't want to EVER have to press!

-Mark

wait a minute

[loveandpeace]

it took them eight years to figure out that people use the Back button even though they don't understand it???

puh-leez. i want a job on this team.

Re:2002 Dupe?

[telstar]

Maybe that's how the new back button works. It takes you back to stuff you've seen a year ago.

It can be worse

[Pac]

You keep hitting back in OpenOffice and end up in vi. You hit back too much in Chatzilla and find yourself in talk.

You backtrack in VisualAge for Java and end up in Simula. Keep going and your code become FORTRAN.

I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

...I never use the back button, I only move forward. It's negativity like the back button that is ruining this country.

Sorry

[Pac]

The Department of Web Browser Backtracking and Forwarding Studies has no open positions at this time. Leave your resume and phone number at the receptionist desk and we will let you know when an opportunity for re-applying arrises.

Back button and PDFs

[Ctrl-Z]

Nothing makes me hit the back button faster than the realization that I've just clicked on a link to a PDF. Come on! Can't you at least warn us?

Coming Soon! Better FORWARD Button!

[Maul]

I have done extensive research and have figured out a way to build a better forward button as well.

Currently the forward button only works after you've hit the back button. This is highly inconvenient, because the forward button is useless when you fire up your browser.

However, my new improved forward button will allow web users to actually click ahead into the future so that they don't have to type the URL of the site they are about to visit. It does this with my patented Mind Matrix Technology (TM) that uses a complex mathematical formula to determine what the user wants to see next.