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

Back button.

[13Echo]

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.

Re:Back button.

[Apreche]

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?

Loving Snap-back

[Space Coyote]

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.

Why not a 'tree' back button?

[slashbofh]

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.

what fine academic detachment, from reality

[kraksmoka]

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 :)

More info isn't always good

[jtheory]

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