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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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Yes. I know better than anyone else what I find useable. A good UI should have sane defaults and be customizable to what I need. Once I configure it properly, it should not change. UI designers should focus on giving us as many options as possible, and setting them to sane defaults.
In any case, horribly broken defaults that can be customized to something I like is far, far better than moderately acceptable defaults that cannot be customized at all.
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