Comment by dstein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dstein | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The problem with the back button is it should not be the sole way to navigate.

It really needs to be split into 2 buttons: "Back" and "Parent" (or "Up"). People use the back button for both purposes. And when you involve Iframes and Ajax-heavy web applications, the context of "back" gets entirely lost and broken.

It's a big problem. There is an HTML5 api to give some level of control over the back button, and this may help to a certain degree. But I really believe it would be preferable to just move these concepts (navigate back and up) right into the web page, or the web application.

There is absolutely nothing preventing web applications from giving a superior navigation experience than a one-size-fits-all web browser buttons.

> it would be preferable to just move these concepts (navigate back and up) right into the web page, or the web application

By web application, I presume you mean for example google docs, rather than a browser.

This would make it even less consistent, wouldn't it? Some pages/apps wouldn't have these controls, or they would look different or be in different locations across different pages/apps.

"Back" and "Up" are virtually indistinguishable for an average user. Hell, I'd be surprised if I could give a good description about the difference, and I know computers inside-out.

> There is absolutely nothing preventing web applications from giving a superior navigation experience than a one-size-fits-all web browser buttons.

Except for the users...

>This would make it even less consistent, wouldn't it?

Microsoft Word does not have a back button. What operation should a back button perform in Google Docs?

>"Back" and "Up" are virtually indistinguishable for an average user.

Sometimes you want to go "back" to the main page of a domain. Other times you just want go to the previous page. Other times you want to leave the website entirely. Other times you want to "undo". It simply makes no sense for a web browser to try to support all these features based on a simplistic web browser history based on URLs. It's an ancient way of thinking about the web.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com