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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.'"
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)
I'm using Vimperator, you insensitive clod!
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."
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.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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?
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.
"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.
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.