The Unused Forward Button
March 12th, 2008 // Posted in Design, Editorial, Tech //
I was watching a video of the new gestures for the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pros and noticed that they are touting the ability to swipe from right-to-left to go “back” in a browser or go left-to-right to go “forward” in the browser. And that got me thinking, have I ever used the forward button? I started to think back on all the years I’ve used web browsers from Netscape to IE to Firefox to Safari and I can’t remember a time when I ever even thought to use the forward button. And that got me thinking about the behavior of other people and whether or not they use the forward button. If people do find that button useful, how do they use it? And what percentage of web users find the forward button useful? I’m very curious about this because ever since the introduction of tabbed browsing I barely even use the back button.
Do you use the forward button? How do you use it?
Yep, I use it, but indirectly. I use the forward/back buttons on my mouse all the time. I use it to…go forward.
Ha-Ha, Mr. Jerky-Pants,
What I don’t understand is the scenario where you get the button to not be gray and allow you to…go forward.
Does IE read your mind? Or have you visited 10 pages, gone back 10 pages, and now click the forward button to slowly go back forward? If that’s the case, why do you do that?
So. Hi Chris.
I use the forward button occasionally when I go back to check something on an earlier page, but then go back to where I was. Usually when I’m doing research for one thing or another.
I use the forward button quite a bit, if I’m using the browser for web design, I open a tab with the live webpage, and then enter the local testing page - and go ‘back’ and ‘forward’ between the local and live versions, then I can open multiple pages in tabs and just switch between the local copy and the online copy with the forward and back buttons.
BUT - at some point firefox added this function where if you click on a certain part of the ‘back’ button, a drop down list comes up of the sites you’ve visited (even if it’s just one) instead of just taking you to the very last page, this has become so annoying that I may not work the same way for much longer.