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Building a Better Back Button

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the beat-a-path-to-your-website dept.

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.'"

8 of 367 comments (clear)

  1. Back button. by 13Echo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I stopped using my back button when I used to use Opera. Tabbed browsing eliminated my need for a back button (in most cases), and kept my browsing organized. Now, Mozilla and Phoenix support this. It's a great feature. Try using it and you will see that your back button gets only a small fraction of the use that it once had.

    1. Re:Back button. by Apreche · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I use phoenix, and I use tabbed browsing. But it has definitely not eliminated the need for a back button. I still use it quite often. Given, not as often as I used to, but saying tabs eliminate the need for the back button is silly. I open a link in a new tab, when it makes sense to. I mean, sure you can emulate this new back button by opening everything in a new tab, and never closing them, but that's rather silly. I also use my bookmarks very effectively. According to these guys I am in the minority. I have 7 folders of bookmarks, each with 4 to 10 pages in them. Every day I go down one by one and open the folders in tabs, one at a time, until I've visited all my sites. Saves lots of time.
      But, if I'm browsing around I might keep google in one tab, and then when I click a search result, open it in a new tab. But I'm not going to put every page of a 10 page article in a new tab. And if I'm in a forum, I'm not going to open everything in a new tab either. I'll end up having un-updated threads, post windows, and a big mess.
      So, I use the back button less, but not that much less. And I use tabbed browsing and bookmarks about as efficiently as you can. Can I get this new better back button as a phoenix plugin?

      --
      The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
  2. Loving Snap-back by Space+Coyote · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I personally love the Snap-back feature built into Safari, where, for example, if you do a google search, go to a result page, go several links deep and realize this isn't what you want, you just click the snap-back button and you're right back to your search results. This goes a long way to reducing my dependence on tabbed browsing, and is probably more intuitive for novice websurfers.

    It works in a generic way for all websites, too, not just google, which is great.

    --
    ___
    Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
  3. Re:Very IE biased, isn't it? by chris09876 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I agree, tabs are great :-) Definitely the way to go in Mozilla. ...but I could see why they'd make the article IE-biased. Most of the people who use the internet are still using IE. When making generalizations about internet browsing experiences, it only makes sense to use the browser with a big monopoly.

    --
    I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
  4. Why not a 'tree' back button? by slashbofh · · Score: 5, Insightful
    One thing that has always irritated me about the back button is the lack of a 'tree' effect. In the notation of the paper, lets say I did this:
    a->b->c->d<=>c<=>b->e

    Now with the stand back button, or even their modified results, I tend to see:

    [b,a], where what I would like to see is something like:

    [b, [c,d] , a]

    I like mouse gestures, and I find the only one I really ever use is back, and tabbed browsing does get rid of a lot of the single back, but I'm suprised that this 'tree' view hasn't been investigated/implemented.

  5. what fine academic detachment, from reality by kraksmoka · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Finally, the improved back remembers pages visited days ago. Explorer and Netscape both delete back memory when the program is closed. Not so with Cockburn's improved version.

    oh, it's been improved to be that way? in the early days of the internet, all the questions i ever fielded from the computarded were, "how do i erase where i've been so nobody else knows?".

    kids don't want their parents to know. guys definately don't want their women to know. and nobody at all wants their government to know where they've been surfing. does the super back button have an erase the back button feature built in???? that's all anyone really wants anyway.

    figures, academia always seems to nail their heads right on all the internet hits.

    best back buttons around today are on Mac revs of Mozilla, IE and most mac browsers. CMD + -- = go back . i jones for it on pc's, it rules. course it did wear out the left arrow key on my keyboard after a few years of going back :)

    --
    "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
  6. More info isn't always good by jtheory · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The "tree" idea won't really catch on simply because most of the alternate branches tend to be mistakes, deadends, etc..

    I think most of the time when you hit a link, back out, and go somewhere else, it's because you didn't find what you wanted. Obviously this isn't always true, but even if it's only true 90% of the time, all of those stumpy little branches on the tree are just extra, unwanted info that will confuse the user.

    I'm curious to see if research would agree with me.... maybe the tree view would be useful if it only saved alternate branches more than 1 link long.

    --
    Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
    Albert Einstein

    --
    There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
  7. Annoying things about back by ThePyro · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The most annoying things about the back button:

    1) I just opened a page in a new tab (tabbed browsing rules). I closed the original tab. Crap! I want to get back there! Yet the back button in the new tab has no idea what the previous page was... Is this still a problem in other browsers that support tabbed browsing? (I'm using Mozilla)

    2) The redirect problem (mentioned somewhere above). A page redirects me so fast that if I go back then I simply get redirected to where I just was. There's not enough time to go back twice.

    3) Ambiguous behavior of back links. Let's say I'm viewing page 5, and I just came from page 6. There's a back link at the bottom. Is this going to tell my browser to go "back" to page 6, or is it going to take me to the page 4 (the page that comes before 5) ? I guess this is more an issue of standardizing the behavior of links named "back"... but it's still obnoxious.

    4) More of a "forward" problem, but still a problem... I visit a site. I follow three or four links, decide I don't like them, and go back to where I started. I then follow a different link. Crap! The first set of link WAS where I wanted to go after all! Unfortunately there's no way to get back there without digging through the history - your "forward" history gets overwritten once you go back and then follow a different link. In some cases you might remember which links you clicked on to get there... but not always.

    The history tree mentioned above might be decent solution to that problem... or maybe not.