420889 - UI error: 'back' drop-down no longer associated with 'back' button

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 415002

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[mathew]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b3) Gecko/2008020513 Firefox/3.0b3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b3) Gecko/2008020513 Firefox/3.0b3

In Firefox 2, the 'go back' drop-down was an option if you held down the mouse button on the 'back' button.

In Firefox 3, it seems that it has been made a separate button.

The problem is that visually, the 'back' drop-down is associated with the 'forward' button, not the 'back' button. On Linux 'back' is to the right of 'forward'. It's even worse on XP, where the fancy new control makes it look like it's a drop-down 'forward' menu.

This is unnecessarily confusing. In fact, I initially assumed that the drop-down was some kind of window or tab switching menu, and that the feature of being able to go back in the history had been removed from the toolbar.

If 'back menu' and 'back button' have to be separate controls, please at least put them next to each other. And for XP... what's the point of detaching 'back menu' from 'back button' and attaching it to 'forward button' instead? It makes no sense at all. I can only assume someone designed the cool buttons first, and then adjusted the UI to match the buttons, rather than designing buttons that actually made sense.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

I won't reject because I'm not involved in FE stuff, but the "back menu" is in fact now a unified "back AND forward" menu, with your current location in history highlighted. 

Comment 2

[Kevin Brosnan]

Bug 386228 changed the behavior you want to revert.

Comment 3

[mathew]

OK, if there's only one history menu now, I can deal with that, but can we not have it so closely associated with the Forward button? I'm willing to bet people use the menu to go back a lot more often than they use it to go forward.

How about putting the menu in the middle of the two buttons? Or on Linux, giving it an icon which is more than just a drop-down menu marker, so it's clear that it isn't just a drop-down menu on the forward button, but is a separate thing.

Comment 5

[Axel Grude [:realRaven]]

Just a suggestion re: #3 (and #1)
in the majority of cases the unified history is used for stepping backwards (as, by design, the forward button is more often disabled than the back button).
It was pointed out that putting it into the middle looked like a "silly face" so if we rule that out, I think the unified history would make much more sense when moved to the left of the back button? Also it will look less like it was copied from IE7, that way.