Redesigning The "Back" Button 356
TheMatt writes "Nature Science Update is reporting today about research by New Zealand scientists on redesigning how the "Back" button works in your browser.
They point to the fact that the current "Back" is more of an "Up" in a stack of pages. They propose a system that records all pages visited. A good summary page of their efforts in web navigation (including a interesting thumbnail-style "Back" menu) can be found on their page."
Re:WHY? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:already have it (Score:5, Informative)
1) Go to the Slashdot main page at http://slashdot.org
2) Go to the discussion about the back button.
3) Click your back button and go back to the main page
4) Click on the link to the discussion about Microsoft being its own worst enemy.
5) Now try to use your back button to get back to the discussion about the back button. On both Mozilla 1.2.1 and IE 6, that piece of data is gone. You go back to the slashdot main page and then back to the site you visited before slashdot. It is a feature I've been annoyed with for awhile.
At the end of the day, I can't just hit alt+- and revisit every page I've been to.
Why is it gone? Because you went "up" in the directory hierarchy to the main slashdot page and so it erased the back button discussion.
I can get to the page in the history of course. And as I read the article, that's really what they are talking about (at least as I understood it): integrating the history into the back button so that you can more easily retrace your steps.
At least that's what I think they are talking about.
The article poorly explains things (Score:5, Informative)
It really *is* different; the problem is that the article explains things very poorly. Here's the difference:
With normal browsers, when you click the back button to a previous page, and then follow a new link on the previous page, the page you were on before you clicked the back button and followed a new link, is removed from the list. This is what they mean by "stack" behavior.
What these guys are proposing is that every time you visit a page, it goes into the back list. Thus if you are on, say, page 2, and click the back button to page 1, then follow a link to page 3, the list stored in the back button is 1 - 2 - 3, and you will go back to page 2. In the current system, the list stored would be 1 - 3; page 2 is gone from the list and no longer available via the back button.
So now you know. Regardless, this behavior is already available in I.E. 5.x and above via the History explorer bar. A simple sort by Order Visited Today gets the list exactly as proposed by the article. Except for the thumbnails, however, which is a very good touch.
Personally, I think it would be best to have *two* such buttons; one that has stack behavior (current "back" button), and another that has the proposed temporal behavior; perhaps as a history pull-down menu.
Research not new, problems not small (Score:4, Informative)
The article mentions the non-technical issues as well: "Unsurprisingly, it's harder to return to index pages with this system - so it's easier to get lost in big websites. New users tended to solve problems either very efficiently or very inefficiently." I believe that this is one of the bigger problems the developers of more advanced navigation systems face, how to provide controls that afford the user good access to the information.
I wish them luck. And if you want to see something like it in Mozilla, please vote for bug 21521 on Bugzilla. It's only got 7 votes, which is pathetic.
On the other hand, if no one cares, perhaps the answer really is to just let it drop. Once again, I wish them luck.
Have both kinds (Score:4, Informative)
The real problem is that the conventional Back and Forward buttons, between them, don't let you traverse the entire tree, but only the right edge. There needs to be some way of getting to the other pages (for example, I'd like to take another look at the article; I can't navigate there in my history, even though it was on my screen two documents ago, nor can I get there from here without either starting from my bookmarks or losing my comment). They use a button which essentially is an "Undo" for following links.
Their results follow from the ability to access your entire history rather than only the right edge, along with using an operation that is frequently the same as the usual design (if you follow a chain of links down, and then go all the way up); this suggests that an approach which retains the regular Back button and adds an "Undo follow" button to go to the document you were on before. Since Forward is relatively rarely used, it could reverse both of these operations, depending on which you did (i.e., undo history navigation).
Re:Does Microsoft read Slashdot? (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't.
Why does IE choke on PDFs?
It doesn't.
Does anybody really still browse using the single window forward, back method?
Sure, when it's more convenient than opening new windows.
Does MS have anybody working on improving IE?
Yes, and they do that. The problem is that you're expecting them to "improve" it in such a way that lets you use the latest version of their browser with bunches of features on your stone-age computer. You're already using a version of IE which doesn't normally crash with tonnes of windows open, you just have no RAM. 16MB is enough to keep it stable, and there's no reason at all to have a computer with less than that. Hell, I have a Dreamcast with more RAM than that.
Re:Some sites already redesign the Back button (Score:3, Informative)
Btw, in most cases, sites did not break the back button intentionally. They were just trying to redirect from one URL to another, and didn't know that Netscape 4 required you to use a specific redirect method in order to avoid leaving an entry in session history.