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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...
Dupe from Last Year.
Google cache here.
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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.
Building a better back better back button!
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).
This is a well-done study the highlights not only a proposed better use of the back button, but illustrates the hard science and methodology of usability studies. If we plan to break free of the standard keyboard-and-screen interface, studies such as these are the foundation. and what pretty pictures, too!
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.
I don't know about you, but for me, the back button is a little thing on a toolbar, not a key.
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!
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.
If I hit back enough do I end up using NCSA Mosaic? Or do I just end up in gopher?
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
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.
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.
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
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
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.
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)
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!
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.
I think the best innovation in back buttons is by far the 5 button mouse. It makes it so your mouse never has to leave the actual page (to go to a toolbar).
But more importantly, it rationalizes the existance of the pinky.
Yet another signature that refers to itself. The irony and humor is dead.
I've been a Phoenix user for some time now, and I really find it superior to IE in many ways. Why? Tabbed browsing, the ability to customize it, great community support, and the most important factor to me.... the Optimoz project and it's implementation of mouse gestures.
I'd estimate that I use Phoenix 99.9% of the time I'm browsing, thus... I use IE sparingly. When I do use IE, I can notice the difference in ease of use almost immediately.
To me, there is no dilemma in terms of what browser to use. Phoenix/Mozilla and far superior to IE, not to even mention Opera's superiority to it.
- - Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand. - -
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
It's a stack of visited pages... but instead of being wiped when the process ends, it's persistant, like a history list! Incredible! I'm amazed they haven't patented it yet!
I'm sorry. I don't normally post 'this article sucks' posts, but in this case, it's just so incredibly pathetically tragic, that I just had to. Once again, I'm sorry, and so I'm sure is the guy who posted this wholly and unforgivably lame article.
If he isn't sorry, that is a problem and should be fixed
.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Mozilla has gestures: http://optimoz.mozdev.org. The gestures are even configurable (unlike Galeon's) with the prefs.js file.
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
Actually moz has had gestures for a while: http://optimoz.mozdev.org/.
But something even better than gestures are the pie menus (found on the same page above, but also at: http://www.gamemakers.de/mozilla/radialcontext/) they are like gestures with a gui (indeed after you use them for a while you never look at the pie-menu any more, except to find obscure actions).
My favorite: RightClickandHold->UpRight->Down->Release (Closes the current tab)
Derek
Look at http://optimoz.mozdev.org and Radical Context for Mozilla.
Personally I feel Radical Context is better than simple gestures, but YMMV.
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 never use the back button, I only move forward. It's negativity like the back button that is ruining this country.
I turn everything on in 'Tabbed browsing' preferences. In addition to 'open in background' enable:
- Ctrl+click and middle-click (opens in new tab)
- Ctrl+Enter (from URL field, opens in new tab)
This should be the default setup, really. Works wonder for downloading pr0n: press and hold down control key, click every thumbnail in sight, and the links will open in separate tabs in the background.
What would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
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.
The article divides up usage patterns of the back button in to modalities. the main one being jumping back to the portal entry page after burrowing down a thread. this is exactly what the SAFARI snapback does.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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
It's just as nice as tabs, but it seems I'm the only one who uses it.
Are you on Windows XP, or do you just run out of Windows 9x's limited "system resources" after about a dozen new windows? Mozilla with 10 tabs open takes fewer "system resources" than IE with 10 windows open.
Will I retire or break 10K?
People are posting ideas about treeview back buttons and different back lists.
I use my History archive for this. I think the history archive could contain a little more "intelligence" in storing previously visited links, and I wish that Mozilla offered a "This Session" history folder that only contained sites/pages visited by the current instance of a browser.
History + configurable 5/7 button mouse + tabbed browsing = a pleasant navigation system.
However, it is good to always question the accepted method of interface design. So, I can't get too down on the article.
It's not as useful as a back button, and not all sites are organized in a way to make it useful. But sometimes I think to myself, "Self.. I wish I had an up button on my browser."
On this train of thought.. would it be that difficult to put one into Mozilla? Everytime I sit down to look into it, some other shiny object comes along.. oo, tin foil
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
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
I've actually seen someone go so far as to state that an undetectable savings adds up world wide, and thus saves *me* frustration and confusion.
"Why yes, we made the red light 0.002 seconds shorter. Sure you don't notice it, but just think how many people drive through that light every day. It adds up to a total savings of ten seconds a day. Wouldn't you like to get home ten seconds quicker?"
I'd like to know what brand of coffee they've been drinking. It must be kick ass stuff.
These are the same people who think saving me ten seconds a day on mouse movement makes me more productive. They don't know me very good, do they? Here's a clue interface optimization guy, mouse movements don't come out of my productive time, they come out of my staring into space and making pointless movements to make it *look* like I'm being productive time.
People aren't machines. If we don't bloody well feel like being productive we'll fuck your efficiency plans every time.
We always have.
KFG
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! ;)
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.
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!
--
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>
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?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
The authors obsess over UI and user-mental-model issues, which to be sure are real enough. But those are not the biggest issues with the BACK button.
First, an extraordinary number of commercial web sites misbehave when the back button is used, probably due to handling of posted form data, passing along nontransient data as strings in URLS, etc. etc. Try a Google search on the exact phrase "Do not use your browser's back button" for examples of a few thousand sites that at least WARN you of problems. For every one that does, there are many that do not. The problems can be very serious, including double-shipped items, items ordered but never shipped, incorrect charges, etc.
Second, the back button seems to painfully and slowly reload pages over the Net. This may be a function of cache settings, but this is a function that should return to a locally cached state by default. Possible even a cached bitmap... (Yes, I know it would be difficult to get this just right without increasing the amount of function misbehavior).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
...then I got bored and hit the BACK button.
I would like to see a change in the Forward button, not the back button.
If I go to a page on a website (page A), visit a page from there (page B), and then go back to page A to visit yet another page from there (Page C), I would like to be able to go back to page A again, and then when I hit the forward button, be offered the chance to go to either page B or C. Kind of a tree arrangement.
Another alternative is to emulate Opera's Hotlist functionality - Have the hotlist dynamically build a folder-view type tree for each site I visit.
Aka, when I go to (for example) Realtor.com, I want to be able to go back to the search page and add more options just by going over to the hotlist and clicking on the Search "folder", three clicks back.
I think I might have to prototype this..
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
My apologies as I forget who to credit for this, but is was posted in a recent Slashdot story about how to block ads and such using your UserContent.css or whatever equivalent. I hope this helps to make your browsing a less visually-dangerous experience as it has for mine.
Cheers. :)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
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.
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.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
"Net surfers use the back button more than any other key"
When did they turn the "back button" into a key? Is there an "any" key now, too?
Anyhoo... I use Alt + left/right directional keys to "scroll" through IE's history, and I tab through links on the page... barbaric, I know. I don't like reaching for the mouse any more than I have too... especially now that my stylus is dead and I've ripped the top off of my mouse so that I have to push the little switches inside... :( .
I hate mieces to pieces.
expletives welcomed
You keep your right hand on the mouse and your left hand near command-w
That's the first time I've heard it called *that*
Net surfers use the back button more than any other key.
You mean the backspace key, don't you? Well I think all f^Hcomputr^Her ^Husers use the back ^Hspace key more than any other key/^H.
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
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.
"No honey I was just counter-programming the browser. The foward button thinks I'm gay"