282988 - Back Button Scrolling

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, enhancement)

Description

[Mark Leverson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 StumbleUpon/1.9991
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 StumbleUpon/1.9991

It would be nice to have a scroll arrow put at the bottom of the Back Button
window. At present when you get into a site, like Web Banking, a lot of pages
are generated. Many more then the 15 now displayed by the window. This causes a
person to do multipe back selections to back out of the site. With a scroll
arrow at the bottom of the window a person could go back to the beginning of the
site much more easily.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Just go browsing forward to more then 15 sites or more the 15 pages in a site
without backing up.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 282482 ***

Comment 2

[Mark Leverson]

This is not a duplicate of bug 282482. This asks for a feature to be added where
that bug asks for a preference. This feature is already functioning in Camino
and is a large improvement in the way a person can browse the web as compared to
Firefox.

Comment 3

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

confirmed RFE

Comment 4

[Brian Salomaki]

I posted this in bug 287277 partially by accident, because I started typing at the bottom and forgot it was the bug that had already been "resolved", although it still applies there.  In any case, this is an alternate solution that may help the problem without muddying up the UI, in response to Jesse Ruderman's comment on that thread:

> This isn't as rare as you seem to think.  Suppose I find myself at
> http://www.ok-cancel.com/comic/29.html and start reading the comics in reverse
> chronological order.  Once I've read the first 29 comics, I want to go back 28
> pages in session history so I can read the remaining comics in chronological
> order.

One additional solution that I thought of that could help this particular part
of the problem (seems like it's one of the very common cases in which the
session history would get that long at all) is to develop some sort of grouping
strategy for history entries, based on things like closeness in time viewed,
similarity of URL, and similarity of page title.  In Jesse's example and other
ones I've run into (specifically today, photos shared on Facebook), all of the
image pages have the same page title.

As a user, I'll often want to go back one image, go back to the first image (as
in Jesse's case), or back to the page before the first image.  If I've looked
at 30 images and they all have the same page title, it's unlikely that I'll
want to go back to the 18th most recent image (because I won't even remember
which one that is).  But wanting to go back to the oldest image or the most
recent non-image both seem pretty natural.

Perhaps the menu could show the fifteen most recent items like it does now, but
then if those 15 items are all similar enough to be grouped (by time, URL,
title, etc.), then show a separator or a '...' or something to indicate that
entries are being skipped, and then show the very first (oldest) element of the
group and the page right before that (the most recent page not in the group). 
Or, if there are only 16 or 17 images in the group, just expand the normal menu
to cover those couple additional entries.

This certainly takes more code than just changing the size of the menu, but may
serve everyone's purpose, allowing users to quickly get back to the pages they
want to get back to, and preventing the menu from becoming unsightly.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

the back button menu has been demoted, removing the dropdown arrow mostly.
In any case, this covers very rare cases, especially nowadays with web apps.