It’s like a little treat waiting for you after you get to the bottom of a long thread. 
When I get to the bottom I just close the page.
When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the thread. Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride. 'Til I get to the bottom and I see you again.
^ :: raucous applause ::
I saw it on two other sites this morning or yesterday morning. Don’t ever recall seeing it before. Is this the ‘recency affect’ or is it new and spreading?
Finding happiness in small things is probably some kind of enlightenment.
It’s nothing new. Web pages from the early to mid-'90s onward often had those “return to top of page” buttons. Somehow I associate those with the Geocities era. They were often boldly marked and brightly colored and sometimes there were several on a page, if it was a long one.
But I never saw the point in them, because it was so easy to simply hit the “Home” key and go to the top instantly without getting any special URLs involved. The Home key always seemed to me neater and less fuss.
But people apparently craved those special up buttons. They’ve been less frequent for many years, possibly because people eventually realized what the Home key does. So are they coming back now? When I saw the new ones, all I could think was why bother?
The Home key is more versatile and efficient because in a text-edit space it takes you to the beginning of the line you’re on, which is often handy to have, while when you have a read-only web page, it goes directly to the top. Two functions in one! Besides, its partner the “End” key has the same two functions in reverse.
The new skin is intended to be mobile-friendly. There’s no home key on a phone or tablet. And you can’t tap the status bar to return to the top on an Android device.
There’s no place like 127.0.0.1
I hated that button. Took up way too much real estate on my mobile device. But they enabled the option to choose the old theme, so everybody wins!