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:Why it was made big

[Threni]

I hate Back taking ages cos it's reloading the screen. It's in memory - just show what you showed last time. I don't care that it might have changed. No, I don't want you to resend the message - just show me the bloody page you showed me just seconds ago before I accidentally clicked/changed my mind.

Re:Why it was made big

[__aamnbm3774]

If I had mod points, I would have modded you up purely for using the word fuckery. Bravo.

Re:Why it was made big

[mysidia]

Yeah, but oftentimes with the flash quackery, the back button doesn't work anyways.

Breaking the back button is one of the most serious design mistakes a webmaster can make. Since, as we can see from just these observations about FF, the back button is one of the most frequently used functions by a large majority of surfers.

Or...

[deesine]

it's the most used gesture: Right button down, drag left.

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.

IE

[Tablizer]

For Internet Explorer, Ctrl+Alt+Delete is tops

Re:IE

[Anachragnome]

"For Internet Explorer, Ctrl+Alt+Delete is tops"

That is almost as bad as setting my Hunter's Feign Death hotkey in Warcraft to Alt-F4...and not testing it until the 4th boss fight in Black Temple.

Re:Uhhhh

[SimonTheSoundMan]

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

I didn't click any ...

[siddesu]

I'm using Vimperator, you insensitive clod!

Zero Times

[h4rr4r]

Zero times, I use vimperator.
I don't need to move my hands from the keyboard like some ape.

Because it's in the upper-left?

[MrEricSir]

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.

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.

Two types of users

[ascari]

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.

Re:Context menu

[Reziac]

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).

Re:Self-contradictory?

[Hatta]

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.