Surf*Mind*Musings

The latest TestPilot analysis shows the predominance of the back button in browser control usage, garnering 2/3 of clicks by user in the browser chrome. The observation that the back button is the most used browser control is longstanding, here’s a view from a ‘06 post excerpting the ACM WWW ‘06 best student paper from Weinrach, et al.:

Table 1: Comparison chart of three long-term studies

The replication of the finding is welcome, and the lack of novelty didn’t prevent Techmeme buzz from sprouting up, probably helped significantly by the excellent visual heatmap. Nice work Mozilla peeps! Here’s a zoom on the back button findings by clicks per user and % of users:

There’s been supposition that the growing use of tabbed browsing is reducing the importance of the back button. Certainly, opening search results into new tabs reduces the need to go back to get to search results as do parallel scenarios in non-search browsing. My recent analysis of tab usage from SRP and non-SRP pages shows that open in new tab is common but still a minority use case for search result browsing.

The TestPilot analysis doesn’t specifically address the relative prominence of back button versus tab switches or links inside pages because it only includes browser chrome — defined as the area surrounding the tabbed browser. I’d love to see a replication of this study which counted clicks on tabs as well as interior to the browsed page UI.