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Developer Tim Bray, of XML fame, has written an ode to The Sacred "Back" Button.
Younger readers will find it hard to conceive of a time in which every application screen didn't have a way to "Go Back". This universal affordance was there, a new thing, in the first Web browser that anyone saw, and pretty soon after that, more or less everything had it. It's a crucial part of the user experience and, unfortunately, a lot of popular software is doing it imperfectly. Let's demand perfection.
Why it matters · Nobody anywhere is smart enough to build an application that won't, in some situations, confuse its users. The Back option removes fear and makes people more willing to explore features, because they know they can always back out. It was one of the reasons why the nascent browsers were so much better than the Visual Basic, X11, and character-based interface dinosaurs that then stomped the earth.
Thus I was delighted, at the advent of Android, that the early phones had physical "back" buttons.
[...] Nowadays Android phones don't have the button, but do offer a universal "Back" gesture and, as an Android developer, you don't have to do anything special to get sane, user-friendly behavior. I notice that when I use iOS apps, they always provide a back arrow somewhere up in the top left corner; don't know if that costs developers extra work.
[...] People using your software generally have a well-developed expectation of what Back should do at any point in time, and any time you don't meet that expectation you've committed a grievous sin, one should remedy right now.
The undo function has been around since the beginning, though invented and reinvented several times. Some systems got it much later than others, but now its presence is universally expected.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @03:45AM (14 children)
Even firefox has at some point succumbed to making backspace (go back) "vanish". For the frustrated, some documentation to fix the issue:
about:config
browser.backspace_action = 0|1|2
0 - backspace goes back in history
1 - backspace goes up in a scrolled page
2 - disabled
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Tuesday April 13 2021, @03:59AM (7 children)
Everyone knows I'm an old fogey by now and as an old fart, I get to rant -- "modern" browsers are getting more annoying and I fully expect them to remove the back button at some point simply because it is useful and convenient as they try to phonicate everything in the world. Kind of like how the menu in Brave is gone and apparently there is no way to get it back except by adding in some extension. So instead of a fast low effort user interface with a logically divided menu instantly accessible, you have to click the little square in the upper right to reveal a drop down menu, then find your menu item in that drop down, then proceed. No more click, bang, done. And it isn't like we're all stuck on EGA monitors -- there's plenty of real estate for a menu.
Even with websites though -- I'm thinking of a financial site I have to go to -- the back button fails to work for a lot of the areas. The only way to go back is to go forward in a circle until you're where you wanted to be -- it turns what would be one step to go back, into three steps forward to get back to where you want to be. I hate that too.
And then there's my lawn ...
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Tuesday April 13 2021, @04:18AM (2 children)
The only way to go back is to go forward in a circle until you're where you wanted to be
Welcome to the web browsing wizard. This wizard will guide you through the process of surfing web pages. Click next to search for a web page.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @04:39AM (1 child)
Why do I now have the image of Gandalf behind a console and it won't get out of my head?
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Tuesday April 13 2021, @05:43AM
Gandalf would do OK. I'm thinking more of Mr. Sideney (from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather) for the web browsing wizard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2nYXLT8T0Y&t=1230s [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday April 13 2021, @04:33AM (1 child)
Like trying to find reverse in a Soviet tank, eh?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday April 13 2021, @08:01AM
You'd be better off trying an Italian tank. 1 forward gear, 4 reverse!
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Tuesday April 13 2021, @08:54AM
Also known as escape-room UI. Very popular in the last ten years or so, particularly on mobile devices.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday April 14 2021, @02:48AM
Here, you can use my soapbox, and my megaphone, and my lawn... absolutely hate this "modernization" of what was once perfectly usable software. Gimme back my damn menus. And my BACK button.
Oh, know why the Moz family, when the mouse pointer is over an image, has no BACK option in the context menu? Cuz back in the 1.x era, whichever dev was in charge didn't like "clutter" (that's what he called it), and removed it. There was an uproar in the newsgroup and someone took a vote: 700 for keeping BACK, 2 for removing it (one of which was the aforementioned dev). Dev said "I like it this way so this is how it stays." (In just about those words.)
May seem trivial but enough of these "trivial" changes and it progresses from nuisance to annoying to unusable.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Tuesday April 13 2021, @05:24AM
Of course the classic function for backspace in non-editor text display (older than the web!) is to scroll up in page. Going back in history in the browser is done by Alt+Left.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @05:27AM
Uh-oh, the official P(olitically) C(orrect) version in recent versions of FF is.... alt-leftArrow. Really intuitive guys. You can tweak about:config but to no avail.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Tuesday April 13 2021, @07:19AM (2 children)
On Android, Firefox doesn't even close pages anymore when using the back button. Very annoying because you have to close every page manually now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @01:35PM (1 child)
It's not annoying, it protects you from accidentally closing a tab if you go one too many back. It's literally just two keystrokes if you want to close the tab, hardly a significant inconvenience.
I hate when browsers close tabs without me telling them to.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Tuesday April 13 2021, @09:14PM
FF used to close a page with the back button and displayed an undo button for a short while. That was perfect, current behavior is annoying because there seems to be no option to get the old way back.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday April 13 2021, @07:57AM
Just another one of the eight million config changes I have to make on every Firefox install to undo all the fuckery they've imposed on it...