It doesn’t seem to work. Is this a choice on G-Mail’s part, to have a disabled “back” button? If so, why? If not, what am I doing wrong?
I’m not seeing this; I have FireFox on Windows XP, and the back button works just fine. Where are you encountering this problem?
On every computer I’ve been on. I use IE, but G-mail’s back button is the only one that doesn’t work for me. It’s weird. It does nussing. I have to hit “Go back to Inbox” to get to my inbox.
Very curious. I just tried it on IE, and everything works just as advertised. Could it possibly be a cookie issue? Apart from that, I regret to say I got nussing, if I may quote you.
Same here, although it does seem to work on some computers. I use a mix of IE6, IE7, and Firefox.
You can just tap the letter ‘u’ and it will being you back to the main page (or your search results).
I use Opera 8 and have the same problem.
Very, very unfortunately, the “programmers” who did gmail took the opposite tack in designing it from Google itself. It’s a full blown “Web 2.0” app that uses various html request tricks to operate. That makes it not work on some browsers right there. They also did not design it to work on all browsers that are “Web 2.0” compatible.
Ergo, the back button doesn’t work in some cases.
Google, IMHO, is moving away from what made it a success with badly designed spinoffs such as gmail. Remember, “Don’t be evil” is just a slogan now.
So it’s a design flaw, or a “who cares” kind of thing? Or was there some point to omitting this helpful and obvious feature, do you suppose?
“Don’t Be Evil” is setting your goals kind of low, no? “Don’t Commit Genocide” as a startup repubic’s national motto.
Or “Never been indicted” in D.C.
There are two gmail options, html, which is slower, but I’m guessing your back arrow will probably work, and normal mode.
The “normal” mode is actually a javascript app that locally generates the pages you see, rather than downloading each and every page. Only the new information is loaded when you change from “inbox” to “sent items” for example…not all the graphics, etc. In addition, the information is compressed for transmission. This makes the application perform quickly, even on bandwidth limited lines, and (important to google) reduces the load on the servers.
Because of this, you are NOT telling the browser to request new URL when you switch mail boxes. Thus the browsers back arrow doesn’t have an old url to go back to.
If you are interested in knowing more about how all this works, I recommendHacking Gmail which is also my cite for knowing the above.
I just noticed I have the same problem - irritating when searching through the archives and you come up with a list of results. The click on one of the results, decide that’s not the one you want and you try to go back to the list - back button doesn’t work and you have to do the search all over again.