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A New Back Button.

grant

19:05 / 08.01.03

Programmers have come up with a new twist on one of the least-thought-about tools for navigating the web: the back button.

From Nature:
They have replaced the current stacking system, which only records index pages, with one that records every page in the order it was visited.

and

"The main problem with the current back button is that recently visited pages disappear," says computer scientist Andy Cockburn of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. "'Back' would more accurately be labelled 'up'," Cockburn says.

I have to admit I don't necessarily "get" this advance. Is this a way to get around auto-loading pages? Or is there something funkier afoot?

How do back buttons work, anyway?

Our Lady of The Two Towers

14:06 / 10.01.03

I'm confused. It seems to suggest that if I go to, say, Tom's Blog, and he links to a specific topic in here which I then go to, and then click on back, then I go to the topic page of Barbelith, which I patently don't. It would have been nice for some examples of what they meant by each system so we could get an idea of what this new advance entailed.

And I thought the Back button worked by navigating along your browser's History file.

w1rebaby

14:44 / 10.01.03

It does, but when you go back from a page, it deletes it from the history file.

Say you go:

A forward B back A forward C

Now, with the old method, if you hit back from C you will go

C back A

and you that's it. Whereas, with the new method, you go

C back A back B back A

At least, that's how I understand it.

It's interesting. I can't really imagine off the top of my head exactly what the benefits would be, though. I'd like to try it.

Kit-Cat Club

15:35 / 10.01.03

So, fridge, you mean that if you visit pages in this order

A B C

and then go back to

B

and then visit page

D

you'll still be able to access page

C

using the back/forward buttons?

Our Lady of The Two Towers

16:24 / 10.01.03

Thanks for that Fridge but, like you, I'm now stuck on the 'but honestly, how useful is that going to be?' bit. It just seems to be building your history list in to the back button.

Linus Dunce

16:41 / 10.01.03

It sounds cool, but yes, it would be nice to retain the old-fashioned "back" button as well, maybe renamed to "up" as suggested.

What would be a lot cooler for me would be a drop-down GUI tree ... anyone here up for taking on their own Mozilla project?

w1rebaby

17:45 / 10.01.03

KKC: yes, I think so. It would effectively treat the back button as if you were clicking a link within that page.

It could be handy, I don't know. I think it's probably more intuitive, but by now I think people have trained their intuition to work with the current "back" method. I wouldn't mind the option to try it, maybe set it from preferences. I wonder if Apple might include it in the new Safari browser? It's still in beta and they seem to be playing with some technologies like that (e.g. there's something called "snapback" which is like a super-back, IIRC, it takes you to the home page of the site you're on).

Hmm, GUI tree... could be interesting. I might be up for that in Moz if my C++ was stronger (rather than practically non-existent). I'd be surprised if nobody had done something like that already, though.

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