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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.'"
Old news. This is why they made it bigger in 3.0.
it's the most used gesture: Right button down, drag left.
damaged by dogma
Just using Mozilla Test Piliot add-on.
How exactly could you know the answer to your query? Well by RTFA of course!
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
For Internet Explorer, Ctrl+Alt+Delete is tops
Table-ized A.I.
Depends on what they want to test. Here is a list so far: https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/testcases/
Or three finger swipe on a Mac.
I'm using Vimperator, you insensitive clod!
Zero times, I use vimperator.
I don't need to move my hands from the keyboard like some ape.
"Now that we know how users are using FF3, we can figure out how to pessimize FF4's UI. It'll look like Office's Ribbon, or Chrome, or Opera, but whatever it is, it won't look or feel anything like FF3. But it'll look good on our resumes when we can say we're up on all the hot new UI trends, even though everyone's flaming us for them. And we'll make sure to use little icons for everything instead of words, because then we don't have as much stuff to translate when it comes time to localize the product."
Sorry if I sound like a curmudgeon, but UI these days seems more about mental masturbation and keeping up with the Joneses than actually taking a good product and making it better. The first couple of months of any major Firefox upgrade has consisted of nothing more than figuring out what they changed, and which about:config settings I need to tweak in order to change it back to something I found usable.
I informally studied the habits of websurfers at my websites with Google Analytics. I found that for almost every page, the most clicked link was whatever I put at the top left.
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'd be interested to see some behavioral UI studies about this.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Read once in a web usability design book that there are two types of users: The ones who are search oriented and the ones that are navigation oriented. Search oriented users use a search engine instead of the browsers navigation bar and the browsers back and forward buttons instead of the web site navigation and links. Navigation oriented users use the browsers navigation bar and the web sites navigation links.
Of course that's an oversimplification but if that's even remotely true (which I don't know if it is) the high frequency of back button use indicates that there are a lot of search oriented users out there. And if that's the case most web sites are designed poorly or plainly wrong from their usability perspective. What I mean is that in-site navigation is a heavy part of most web sites when it really shouldn't be. Instead web design should promote the use of in-site search and back button use.
Multitouch is amazing. I'd say get a Mac just for that, if I hadn't heard that windows 7 has some gestures, too. Mac has a decent gesture vocabulary, but they really need some way for you to define your own, too, especially as many applications don't support the full vocabulary.
At any rate, I love my "giant" (or as I now refer to it, "the right size") trackpad. The new iMacs should've come with a USB multitouch pad instead of the new mouse.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I would have thought Slashdot's 'submit' button would have been the one most clicked in Firefox.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Do you all just use the 3-button mouse that came with your Dell? Back and forward buttons have been common on mice for the last decade. Why click a toolbar button when you can just use your thumb?
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Screen real estate is valuable, and knowing how often buttons are used tells you which ones to make easily accessible and which ones can be buried.
When it comes to UI's, "most clicked" should absolutely be equated to "most valuable". Doing otherwise could result in a horrid design where the simplest tasks require very convoluted and excessive steps.
the F2 key is the most used key in Solitaire
Likewise...
Except when the entire visible area is an image, in which case there IS no "back" on the context menu, thanks to a moronic decision back when Mozilla was new, and that persists today across the entire Moz-based family.
Seems the lead programmer thought there was too much "clutter" on the context menu, so removed "back" when the pointer was over an image. There was a huge outcry in the MozDev newsgroup, and a vote of 701 to 2 (yes, real numbers) to restore it, but his response was essentially "*I* like it this way, so fuck you. Moz isn't meant for end users anyway." (I witnessed this exchange in the newsgroup myself.)
Someone made a patch to address the deficiency, but it was not widely distributed and seems lost to history. Perhaps someone will see fit to recreate it, for those of us who curse this decision on a daily basis (but not being coders, have no way to fix it).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
> Erm, that's an average of 66 clicks per user I'd imagine.
He's no statistician.
Since the study was made with a Firefox plugin, I think you'll find that 100% of the Windows, Mac and Linux users in the study use Firefox.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
... there's no "OMG! My eyes!" button.
Have gnu, will travel.
I use Opera with an extremely minimalist setup. No nav buttons no search bars, just thin unobtrusive tabs and address bar. My mouse has back and forward buttons. I know where my F5 key is. To google I just right-click a word and search that (with google as my default search engine) or, more often, I just type "g [search term]", sans quotes and brackets obviously--in the address bar.
Though Chrome makes it one step easier by making anything that's not a properly formed URL into a search term, I still don't like Chrome compared to Opera....that DNS prefetch is terribly inconsistent.
3 button optical mice where the center button is a scroll wheel are still very common.
Actually, I rarely see anyone with a mouse that has more than 3 buttons. I don't think most computer users have what you are referring to. /p
I'd like to personally meet the guy that moved the reload button from the tool bar and put it in address field way off to the right of Safari. They also removed it from the customizable buttons so it HAS to be there. That was the day before I started using Firefox as my number one browser.