The Sacred “Back” Button

tbray.org

Safari on iOS back button is awful. If I am scrolling a page, I need to scroll back up to see a back button and if my keyboard is open there is no back button no matter what I do.

I normally really appreciate apple’s UX and simple designs but this is one of those cases where I think they got it wrong.

Why not just swipe right to go back?

Just moved back to iPhone and did not realize I could do that and this is part of the problem. How is a new user to ios meant to know this? There was a time when most actions had a button, that button included text that explained what the action was. UX was much better back then. Today everything is minimalist which maybe pretty, but is not easier.

Another way to do it that took me ages to realize — you can tap the site name to bring up the back button

No more convenient than scrolling up, but preserves your article place and scrolling sometimes fails to bring up the menu; don’t know why.

Side note: far more irritating is the menu comes up every time you scroll up on a pdf — there’s more than enough wasted space as-is

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