257918 - Middle Click "Back" and "Forward" buttons should jump to next domain

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, enhancement)

Description

[Ben Ward]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3

Since middle-click on the "Back" and "Forward" buttons is currently
non-functional, I propose that this should adopt a new behavior of going Back to
the previous domain (or Forward, I will abbreviate by just referring to "Back"
here, you can assume that I'm implying the reverse behaviour for "Forward").

Opera introduce "Fast-Forward" and "Rewind" buttons to the browser genre  in
version 7.5, which performs this functionality. While powerful and useful, it
does require additional buttons be present on the toolbar. Since Firefox is
already encouraging the use of "middle click" (close tab, for example), it would
make sense to extend middle-click (alternate click) functionality to other parts
of the UI.

There is an extension available for FX which mimicks the Opera 'extra buttons'
implementation.

Forward is arguably less useful than Domain-Back, but if implemented should be
provided for consistancy, even if it were used more rarely.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:



Expected Results:  

Jumping back and forward by entire domain is useful when browsing forums and
blogs, and most types of site. Consider searching Google for a type of page.
You'd click on the top match, check out the site, but might look at a good
number of pages before deciding to jump back to your starting place. Rather than
multiple clicks on the Back arrow, or choosing the back drop down, a single
middle click is both faster and intuitive for users introduced to using the
middle button by other Firefox functionality.

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

right now, middle-click is being used consistently for tab-related activities,
not as an alternate action button.  Middle clicking on other items (including
the Home button) opens the link in a new tab.  Based on this, middle-click on
back/forward would be expected to be "open previous page in a new tab" since
that's what we're using that for everywhere.

I think that implementing this would at best create confusion for users who
tried it.  As a note, I never actually knew what the fast-forward/rewind buttons
were for in opera, and got rid of them pretty quickly.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

Bug 182138 covers adding the rewind feature, regardless of what UI accesses it.