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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.'"
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if certain people didn't abuse the back button, either...
The site's already timing out. I like the back button, and any method to improve it (like the nice contextual menus that appeared in NS4 and IE4) would be a boon to my productivity. The article is the most scientific explanation of the "Back" button ever. However, some of the stuff they talk about sounds a lot like a function cured by Apple's SnapBack feature in Safari.
Conglom-O: We Own You (TM).
So they've programed a great back button. Cool. Now, I love the back button and all - I use it a lot - but I generally like to have a browser to go along with it. This makes no mention of the idea actually being implemented in any current or future browser.
~metal_llama out.
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move every sig!
Apple's web browser, Safari, has a rather elegant alternative: the SnapBack feature. If you type in a web address and then dig deep into nested set of links, you can go back to your original page with the click of a button. You can set any page to be the page you snap back too as well. Makes for very quick and easy googling!
sig my booty, check my website
Make it skip those advertising links and go back to the first non-ad location.
Those back-button-disabled sites annoy me. It is MY back button, not doubleclick's.
the article says "(just 2 per cent of people use history, says some mid-1990s research)"
and how many people were using the web in the mid 90s?
and "Microsoft even gave a laptop computer and other support to the cause"
wow. a laptop.
Shaving even 0.002 seconds off the back command is worthwhile because millions of button clicks worldwide will be a little more efficient, he says. "If we can save a tiny bit of frustration and confusion, that's the way to improve computer interfacing."
Well I'm glad they clarifyed that little detail, now I can sleep better at night knowing I've shaved a few clock cycles off my daily routine. I dread to think what the 'analysts' would say if they heard that, we'll be saving X amount of money per fiscal year by using this new back button... kinda straight out of Dilbert!
On a side note, (when I use Mozilla or Opera) the tabs come in handy... or if using IE, I tend to open most pages in new browser windows, so I have pages available at hand (still on dialup, so it does make a difference)... hehe maybe they're right about the 0.002 seconds!
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Apple's new browser (Safari) has a "snapback" feature, in effect a second back button that goes back in the stack to the last page loaded via a typed-in URL or bookmark. The user can also mark any page to be snapped back to.
This addresses one of the issues the authors of this study are looking at (getting out of a deeply-nested site), without modifying the familiar stack-based 'back' behavior used by all browsers.
"Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible" -Jacob Bronowski
That was the general idea of his comment. The thing that most people don't understand in the hardware/software innovation areas is that Speech Recognition, Gestures, Pen input is all great, but with clunky interfaces, poor pattern problems, and standardized, almost Pavlovian use of keyboards for input and mice for movement on a screen. Very few, if any are ever gonaa change unless you do something radical like Apple Computer and just make it standard. IE, they pushed USB and no floppy and have had a 70% adoption of the two concepts.
This is the general reasoning behind the PDA adoption rate. Who wants to look at a tiny screen? But really, who wants the frustration of character recognition, "I WROTE D DAMMIT, not an O!" (only a small population, even in face of lots of units sold, actually learned Graffiti well enough to use it)
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
- 90% of the time I open links in a new window. (I hate those "clever" javascript links that won't let you do that...)
- I rarely ever use back because most pages are dynamic, so I know I'm still going to have to hit f5 if I want to see the news.
- I almost exclusively use the back button on my mouse if I need to go "back" for any reason. (Sometimes you have to go back past a page with automatic redirection, and it's handy to be able to pick exactly which page you want to go back to from the drop-down list off the back button on the browser.)
- I'll admit that browser tabs might be nice, but I do just fine with the "tabs" at the bottom of the screen by the start button.
Why do I need a better back button? I don't.I think I could love that. Oh, and the ability to disable page reloads on back.
One of the worse offenders IMHO is Google when opening cached copies or a failed search, but automatic search on something it thinks is like the search item. I'd rather a failure and leave it at that, perhaps with the hint of other possibilies, but the auto thing is a bastard.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
if your mouse driver allows you to define the behavior of the middle button, which many do, then you can map it to ctrl+shift+leftclick which is the shortcut for open new window in background in Opera. hope this helps
I thought everyone used 'right click -> open in new tab' more often than the back button?! Back is only good for getting out of a 200 page PDF! ;)
"but I'm suprised that this 'tree' view hasn't been investigated/implemented."
/ /s martbrowser.com/
Oh, but it has. You're describing HistoryTree, my award-winning browser plugin from 1996:-)
Here, check the Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/19970121043309/http:
-Matt Jensen
The real issue is SPEED.
In Netscape 3, going BACK was instantaneous. Of course it was: the browser already had the page in its cache, so it was a simple matter of re-rendering it.
Not any more: going BACK now entails re-fetching the page. Why? This is nonsense. If I want the page refreshed, I have a perfectly good REFRESH button to do that with. But when I click BACK, it's because I want to go back to what I was looking at before.
And with Mozilla (I don't think NS6 did this but I'm not sure), it's yet worse: if you go BACK to a page that you reached by POSTing a form, you have to click a button to re-submit the form contents. For badgers' sake! Just show me the page I was looking at already!
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What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
It is not guaranteed that any web surfer would want to navigate like this. (not even considering tabbed browsing) More precisely, two approaches are possible :
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Regular, stack based, back button, which inmplies a "radiating" browsing model (sort of portal-based). This model strongly favors Apple's snap-back approach.
/. or the main page of a site, offering many links. I follow one of the link, which may or not be relevant. Only if it is not wish I to got back to the former portal a browse another link.
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New, temporal based, back button, whiwh implied a more linear browsing, mainly because the complete history stack is erased by branching to another link.
I don't think the new proposed approach is very effective, nor is it intuitive.That is : While browsing, I come across a "radiating point", or an info-portal like
Why don't they try to run their first test (ask if it possible to go back to a certain page using the back button) to see if their students understand the second model better that the first ?
What about testing the second model using a satisfaction survey after, say, one week of regular web browsing test ?
Obviously this article is quite interresting, and the fact that the back button has far more used that any other a good starting point for optimization, but it may not be the right answer...
This is useful, for example, on a google search. Do the google search, click on link, burrow a few links in. Now I want to go back to the google search results page. Click on the Snapback arrow, and viola I'm there.
Yes, there are other ways of doing this, e.g. tab browsing. But it is a neat and useful feature.
APP: Opera for PC
TECHNIQUE:
BACK: <RIGHT-CLICK-N-HOLD> - <LEFT-CLICK>
FORWARD:<LEFT-CLICK-N-HOLD> - <RIGHT-CLICK>
I really like the idea of maintaining a Back trail that includes leaf nodes of browsing paths. But I was kind of hoping their list of Back Button Improvements would include dealing with sites that hijack your Back button to do a refresh or launch sixteen popups. Like maybe add them to a Ban-This-Damn-Site-From-My-Browser list.
Mid-90's research. Not much about the internet has changed since 1995 now has it?
I am a big fan of "Open Link in Background Window/Tab" offered by a lot of smaller web browsers.
I currently use K-Meleon while on the PC, and iCab on the Mac.
One thing I wish the "Back" button could do is remember the page that sent me to the page in quesiton, even if it was in another window or tab.
Try this: Right click on a link. Select "Open in new window" (or tab). In that new window 9or tab), try using the Back button.
The browser *should* be able to remember where you were coming from. iCab used to do this (going on my memory here), but no longer does.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman