The 'Back' Button the Most Clicked Firefox Icon

darthcamaro writes "How many times did you click the 'Back' button in your browser last week? According to a new study from Mozilla, it's likely that you clicked 'Back' a whole lot. 'Across Windows, Mac and Linux 93.1 percent of users clicked the button at least once over the course of a five-day period. In total the study reported that users clicked on the back button 66 times over the course of five days. The next most used button is the 'Reload' button with 73.2 percent usage and 22 clicks on average per user over five days. Other areas of the main window that were heavily used include the Search Bar where users input search queries. The study found that 67.9 percent of users used the Search Bar for an average of nearly 16 clicks per user over the course of five days.'"

Comments

Why it was made big

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Old news. This is why they made it bigger in 3.0.

Re:Why it was made big

[spazdor]

Sometimes links won't open in a new tab because they're implemented with some Flash and/or Javascript fuckery. When this happens, I just regular-click on the link and then middle-click on the 'back' button - thereby opening up the previous page in a new tab instead.

Re:Uhhhh

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Just using Mozilla Test Piliot add-on.

Re:Uhhhh

[Sir_Lewk]

How exactly could you know the answer to your query? Well by RTFA of course!

The study data was collected on an opt-in basis from nearly 10,000 users of the Mozilla Test Pilot addon which surveys Firefox usage.

Re:Uhhhh

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Depends on what they want to test. Here is a list so far: https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/testcases/

Re:Because it's in the upper-left?

[Just Some Guy]

My hypothesis was that our eyes were just drawn to any graphic at the top left, no matter what it was, and so we'd click on it.

I have a Google Adwords block on my personal website. Up until a month ago, the ad had been on the top right corner of the screen. I was playing around and moved it to the top left.

From January 1 to June 1, I had x hits, y clicks, and made $z in ad income.

From June 1 to July 1, I had almost exactly x/5 hits; I served 1.03 times more hits during that month than I had per average in the last five months. I also had .54*y clicks that month, or 2.71 times as many clicks per average month. Finally, I earned 1.42*$z last month, or 7.11 times per month as much as during the first five months. Of the top 20 highest-earning days in the last 5 years, 6 were in the last month.

Let me repeat that: changing almost nothing but the ad placement from top-right to top-left increased my click-through rate 171% and my monthly ad income by 611%, on almost the exact same number of hits.

Yeah, I'd have to agree with you.