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

2002 Dupe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dupe from Last Year.

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.

Link is to a PDF, here is the Google cache

[m00nun1t]

Google cache here.

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?

Re:Back button.

[inerte]

Don't forget that you can go back a page with your mouse. Deafult configuratios is hold right button and click left button.

Forward is reverse, hold left and click right.

And since Opera (by deefault) doesn't reload backed or forwarded pages, this operation is very fast.

Not to mention gestures: Hold right button and move mouse to the left, you are back. Hold right button and move mouse to the right, and you go forward.

Frankly, Opera kick ass ;-)

Re:Back button.

[nil_null]

I really like what Opera did with the Forward button. Do a Google search, and you can use the Forward button (or the equivalent keyboard keys) to go forwards through the search result. I just tried it on a review site and it worked on one of the reviews! It appears that Opera will allow you to use forwards on any page with a "Next" link.

I've been waiting for this feature for a long time, to the point that I've thought of writing it myself. As a simple solution, I thought about making a macro that used Mozilla's type-ahead find to click on Next. I got tired of scrolling down to the end of the page and finding and clicking the Next button over and over again.

Well, now Opera has this much needed feature, and hopefully the other browsers will copy it from them.

Back button improvement? Nah, forward button is what needs the improvement...

Re:Back button.

[Sparr0]

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

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.

Where's the Info?

[metal_llama]

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.

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.

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?

Just build it like this for now...

[Wolfier]

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.

naively written

[thegoldenear]

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.

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:Very IE biased, isn't it?

[chris09876]

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.

0.002 seconds saved

[T-Kir]

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!

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.

Re:Why not a 'tree' back button?

[MattJ]

"but I'm suprised that this 'tree' view hasn't been investigated/implemented."

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:/ /s martbrowser.com/

-Matt Jensen

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.

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 :)

What would be nice..

[ackthpt]

Would be disabling javascript on selected pages. I.e. the ability to right-click->open-page-in-new-window/tab-with-java -disabled

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.

Re:it be nice

[andrew_0812]

I am assuming that he means that some sites have a redirect and then if you hit the back button, it goes back to the redirect page, and then back to the page you are on. We have that problem with our content filtering provider at work. If they deem some site inappropriate, they pop up a blocker page. If you hit back, it tries to load the offensive page again, and you end up back at the blocker page. You just have to use the drop down menu on the back button.

I have never had a page that could disable the back button, so I assume this is what he means. Of course, we all know what happens when we assume...

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

Re:it be nice

[GreyPoopon]

I have never had a page that could disable the back button, so I assume this is what he means.

The funny thing is, this report doesn't address at all what I see as the biggest problem with the "back" button. Since I develop online web scenarios that interact with backend systems in a stateful manner, I'm constantly having to deal with the fact that the back button sends little or no information to the online system when used. This is, of course, because browsers are stateless. It would be nice if the back button could be programmed to work like an html form submit that sent the contents of the current form along with some control code. This would make synchronizing with the online system much much easier, rather than having to "guess" which state the program should be in from the next form submit following use of the back button.

One option we've used is to deploy browsers with the back button disabled, but this really annoys users who would like to just browse the internet. We discontinued this practice almost before we started it.

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?

What about an updated Forward button?

[ldopa1]

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..

Add this to your UserContent.css...

[interactive_civilian]

Or whatever your browser uses for user-defined style-sheets:

/* Blacklist link (Mozilla) -- Blocks goatse.cx */
a[href*="goatse.cx/"]
{
text-decoration: line-through ! important;
color: brown ! important;
}

that will mark all goatse.cx links brown with a line through them. Never be fooled again.

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. :)

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.

Annoying things about back

[ThePyro]

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.