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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, there are two conceptions of the back button, and the browser only implements one.

One conception is "take me back to the previous screen I was on", one is "take me one level up the hierarchy." They're often but not always the same.

Mac Finder is a perfect example of a program correctly implementing the two. If you're deep in some folder and then press cmd+win+l to go to ~/Downloads, cmd+up will get you to ~/, but cmd+[ will get you back to where you were before, even if this was deep in some network drive, nowhere near ~.

I feel like mobile OSes lean towards "one level up" as the default behavior, while traditional desktop OSes lean more towards tracking your exact path and letting you go back.

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Desktop had this solved, on Windows there was and remains a distinction between "back" (history) and "up" (navigation).

Browsers actually used to have hierarchical navigation support, with buttons and all, back in the age of dinosaurs - all one had to do is to set up some meta tags in HTML head section to tell which URL is "prev"/"next"/"up". Alas, this has proven too difficult for web developers, who eventually even forgot web was meant for documents at all, and at some point browsers just hid/removed those buttons since no one was using them anyway.

The "Back" remains, and as 'Arainach wrote, it's only one concept and it's not, and never has been "up one level in the hierarchy".

EDIT:

The accepted/expected standard way for "take me up one level in hierarchy" on the web is for the page itself to display the hierarchy e.g. as breadcrumbs. The standard way to go to top level of the page is through a clickable logo of the page/brand. Neither of those need, or should, involve changing behavior of browser controls.

> The problem is, there are two conceptions of the back button, and the browser only implements one.

In web browsers, there is only one concept.

There is no concept of "up one level in the heirarchy". If you want that make your own button in your website.

> There is no concept of "up one level in the heirarchy". If you want that make your own button in your website.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-move-up-one-url-level-in-chrom... *shrug*

> Chrome/Firefox: Ever been reading a site and wish not to go back to the last page you visited, but the last page in that web site's hierarchy?

This statement makes no sense to non-tech people. Most people don't think of sites hierarchically, at least not from a url path perspective.

amazing, took me 5 clicks of the back button to finally get back from that link

Isn't the problem already solved at the browser level? Most (all?) modern browsers support a press/click & hold of the back button to view the back history and quickly jump to any page in that tab's history.

*Edit - I left this in the wrong place, those extensions behave slightly differently.

Those are third party extensions, not browser features, and they're not consistently applied.

Going from an image to a root domain is not a hierarchy and as a pathological data hoarder who has downloaded a lot of images from a lot of sites I don't understand why I'd ever want that feature. It's wild that that's their first example use case on the article.

Similarly, going from page N of results to page 1 isn't "up a level in heirarchy".

Agreed. I remember addons from the XUL Firefox era that did this.

I miss that feature. And that era.

> one is "take me one level up the hierarchy." They're often but not always the same.

Who expects this behavior? It doesn't make sense. You just want to go back where you were. Most file browsers I've used wanting to implement going up a level in hierarchy, have an arrow pointing up.

Nobody

GNU Info and many Web 1.0 navigation schemes involved a hierarchy which did involve "Next", "Previous", "Up", and "Home" type dimensions.

For example, the Bacula documentation is still online, as a prime example of this: https://www.bacula.org/9.6.x-manuals/en/main/Getting_Started...

If you reached point B from point A - and you tell someone "I would like to go back", then you are expecting to go back to A. Not some intermediate, arbitrarily chosen point C.

You're describing 2 different concepts, back and up, not 2 backs

Exactly. It is crazy that they described MacOS finder as doing this correctly when finder has no concept of up, it only has a back.

Command–Up Arrow: Open the folder that contains the current folder. (https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650)

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