Mozilla has a painful back problem. On the contextual menu, back is not always the topmost item, and it is totally omitted in many cases. This makes browsing the web a lot harder. If you’re browsing around and an image fills the screen, then you cannot simply click back to return to the previous page. For browsing photo galleries, getting back to the previous page with the broken context menu is much harder. One would have to move the mouse all the way back to the back button instead of performing a simple right mouse button click.

The other alternative is to lift one’s hand from the mouse (or trackball) and move it over to the keyboard to hit the non-obvious (to many users) keyboard shortcut, which is annoying and takes a lot of time. Shifting back and forth between the keyboard and input device is a really bad idea, especially when an application uses keys where the hand that touches the mouse (usually the right hand) is needed to hit keys on the keyboard (in this case, the arrow keys, combined with the control key). Even left-handed mouse users need to lift their hands from the mouse to hit the keyboard shortcut, as most people use the control key on the left side of the keyboard (where it is sometimes the only control key on the keyboard, especially in laptopss).

Personally, I thought this was a mistake that would have been cleared up a long time ago, but it seems that this brain-dead, crack-monkey behavior was intended.

In Bugzilla, the bug is marked as “WONTFIX”, even though it has over 160 comments and 60 votes.

Right now, this is the most annoying “feature” of Mozilla.

As comment 163 puts it, “In other words, a geeky fixation on extreme sub-categorization trumps usabilty.” Matthew Miller (the author of that comment) is 100% correct.

There are also several duplicate bugs on this topic:123376,135997,136050,137655,138744,140317,143378,146442,156932,157089,167504, and then, of course, 135331, which is the bug I linked earlier (I suppose it is the “official” bug of the back & forward missing from many menus).

Someone really needs to fix this. It used to work fine in Mozilla. This is a major usability regression. Sigh.

In other news, some random stranger gave me a wake-up call at 6:30 a.m. (That’s why I’m posting this detailed bug, and also at the time I’m posting it.)