Agile Ajax

Dying to see the new Gmail’s back-button support in action

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, October 31, 2007 @ 12:04 pm

Even though it's on a slow rollout and has reached only a handful of users, Gmail's new UI has already earned tons of coverage. The new Gmail boasts a fast new JavaScript architecture, an improved contact manager and a host of interface tweaks, all of which I'm dying to see and use. But the feature that excites me the most is back-button support.

From the Google Operating System blog (emphasis mine):

Gmail has a new architecture that improves the performance and the usability. Now you can use the back button in your browser and bookmark URLs from different Gmail views because the URLs change when you go to a different section. The messages are prefetched when Gmail loads so you don't have to wait too much until a message is displayed.

With all the work I'm doing on Really Simple History, I'm excited to see exactly what kind of back-button support the new Gmail offers. If I use the "newer" and "older" links to navigate through 10 messages, will I be able to use the back button to cycle back through them? Or will only the major views of the page (Inbox, Starred, All Mail, etc.) get stored in the browser's history? I'm also interested as to why only IE7 and Firefox users will see the new interface. What's holding up Safari support? (For that matter, what's been holding up official Opera support all these years?)

If you're one of the lucky few who's already gotten to see the upgrade, please tell us all about it in the comments - especially your experience with the back button.

In the meantime, here's a round-up of posts about the upgrade:

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Comments: 3 so far

  1. Hi,

    I’m one of the lucky guys who can experience the new gmail. Let me tell you that the back-button support is amazing, you can go back not only to messages but also to different labels :)

    Regarding to the pre-fetch is really amazing, emails just open, NO LOAD.

    Thats all for now, let me know if you want more information.

    Comment by blanconet, Thursday, November 1, 2007 @ 9:41 am

  2. The URL is different on each type of page.

    All Mail: https://mail.google.com/mail/#all
    Older page of All Mail: https://mail.google.com/mail/#all/p2
    Reading a mail in Inbox: https://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox/115e7d559d2a71c5
    Reading a mail under label: https://mail.google.com/mail/#label/Label_Name/115f066d1dfd7ed8

    So you can use the Back and Forward any time.

    Comment by gmail2.0user, Thursday, November 1, 2007 @ 6:32 pm

  3. After testing out the new Gmail, I’m amazed with the updates. The prefetching seems to contribute a lot to the snappiness of the new app and the back button really works well.

    When I looked into the source code, I was surprised to see that it wasn’t what I expected. For the longest time I thought that the main page was composed of a single document which used XHRs and other javascript techniques to fetch data and edit the layout every now and then. What surprised me is the fact that there was almost no markup in the mainpage, except for several script definitions, a few weirdly named divs and two iframes–one for a flash object that handled the sound and another which displays the main GUI of the app.

    As I have never tried looking at the sc of gmail before, I’m left to wonder as to whether or not this has been the way gmail was structured before.. Can anyone enlighten me?.. ^_^

    Comment by Mark, Saturday, November 3, 2007 @ 8:44 am

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