Do users understand the browser back button?

On a related note, I've noticed I actually never use the actual back button anymore via click or keyboard. Instead I do Chrome's two-finger back swipe on my Mac trackpad. It's the easiest motion to use since my fingers are already on the trackpad. I imagine this is a growing trend and therefore developers should also worry about overriding this feature via horizontal scroll commands.

> untouchable" 12 years ago, it would be even more so today in 2011.

You might also say that there are many more naive users today, and that bad designers have been breKin the back button a lot more often, which means that fewer people know what should happen and people have less expectation that what should happen is what's going to happen.