The meaning of the Home button in browsers

Question

I'm not talking about the Home on the website or an app but the home on the browser itself.

First of all, I saw no use for that button eversince I first touched a browser. Maybe it made no sense to me before why a button like that was needed and why I should go to Google (my home page) when I click it. To give a use comparison in the next section, we'll use the forward and back buttons.

Until now, some browsers offer the Home button, but still made no sense to me. It's even a visible button in the default toolbar for some browsers. As for the back and forward, we see users use the back almost always thus it was enlarged in some browsers. But the forward button made little sense that it was miniaturized or even omitted from display in today's browsers.

Newer browsers default home to the "top pages" or a page similar to the new tab page. If that's so, how would it differ in functionality with the new tab button?

So for home:

• What was the original purpose of the Home button?
• Was it good UX to have that button or was it useless to begin with?
• Is it still relevant in today's usage of browsers?
• If not, for what purpose is it being retained?

Answer 1

Here's some answers to some of your questions based on my personal experience over the years:

What was the original purpose of the Home button?

The home button stems from the time when the internet was a new thing to home computer users. Being a short link to the browser's default start page, it offers a way of consuming content and as such it was more comprehendable at a time when browsing interlinked media was not yet common.

Just like the front page of a common printed newspaper, front pages often were content aggregators provided by browser manufacturers (msn.com for internet explorer or apple.com for safari, for example) or teleoperators. The front page was, historically, a common point of entry for the browsing experience. The home button offered a way to return to a familiar web page that offered a collection of links to go to next as well as a familiar "surrounding".

Historically, the home page also refered to people's own web sites. Before the commercialisation of the internet, it was common place for people to have their own personalized web sites (much like social media profiles nowadays), which they also accessed as a point of origin of a browsing experience, with own content publishing interfaces and link collections. Thus folks used to also set their own personalized web pages to the home button. (Relying mostly on personal experience here with this argumentation, but at least the "home page" site on wikipedia seems to somewhat agree.)

Was it good UX to have that button or was it useless to begin with?

Personally, I think it was a good user experience. Just like the back button, the home button was one of those really reliable escape routes for the user - and in the early wild, wild days of the internet you'd sometimes just want back to the start of your browsing experience, so to say.

Is it still relevant in today's usage of browsers? If not, for what purpose is it being retained?

Today, I think the home button suffers a tolerated existance for the sake of many users that have gotten used to using it over the years, but it's importance in browser user interfaces has been in decline. Personally, I don't see it in on my Firefox bar, nor on the Chrome - that might be attributed to customized interfaces, but I do think also the standard distributions leave the home button away.

What remains current is the functionality the home button once offered, which was a shortlink to the beginning of browsing the web. Today, this just happens by opening a tab, and many browsers have adopted to showing a collection of most used websites as the "start page" - because users today are using the internet with more distributed points of entry they choose themselves, rather than through a start page with predetermined routes to content they like.

Answer 2

What was the original purpose of the Home button?

To give a page to start with for a browser. Unlike now, IE browsers didn't have a 'Browser Home Screen' which will open when browser application starts and browser needed a URL to open.

Was it good UX to have that button or was it useless to begin with?

I don't use it anymore, but few years ago 'Home' button meant to me as 'www.Google.com'. I got so used to it that I didn't have to type 'Google.com' in the address bar anymore. I think it was more of a case of development of 'User Habbit' than being a good design or bad design.

Is it still relevant in today's usage of browsers?

If not, for what purpose is it being retained?

Nope, Safari and Chrome doesn't have it anymore by default and Mozilla opens the 'Firefox Start Page' instead of any other URL

Answer 3

What was the original purpose of the Home button?

It was a quick way to get to a common starting point that a user would use. In the days before tabbed browsing, it was handy to quickly get back to your starting point with a single click. Most people used it for a search page.

Was it good UX to have that button or was it useless to begin with?

It's rare that having a button to quickly access common user behavior is a bad UI design.

Is it still relevant in today's usage of browsers?

That probably depends on the user, but probably not for most. The combination of having tabs where you can open a new tab and have it go to your home page (which maps nicely to the action where a user is starting a new thought process) or the search bar (which maps nicely to the desire to search for something new) largely supersede the home button in functionality.

If not, for what purpose is it being retained?

Lots of browsers haven't retained it. Those that do generally do so because some users may still like it. In the context where the home page is a dashboard, the tabs and search bar may not make as much sense as a single button. I know when I checked the news more often (as recently as a year ago) I had the home page set to my iGoogle page and I used it regularly. Based on the number of people who have objected to the termination of iGoogle, it is clear that a fair number of other people also like quick access to this dashboard like functionality.

Answer 4

It seems the answers provided are from users who don't see the value or understand the concept of a homepage and are therefore biased against the concept. The purpose of a home button, of course, is nothing more than to display a homepage with a single click or tap. If your home page is google.com then it's not of much value. If, like me, you have a homepage with 50 or 60 links to resources you use on a daily basis then it's a different matter altogether. The ability to refer to your "index of resources" with a single click, or to have as the default page of a new tab, is invaluable. A most used page is useless if it does't show the link to the page you want next. I consider my homepage to be an invaluable tool which I use constantly, every day, in my work and personal life. The ability to get to it with a single click of the home button is something I will not do without. Therefore, mobile Chrome does nor appear on my iPhone, even though it is my browser of choice for Windows.

Answer 5

The "meaning" of this button is simply to allow the user to configure the browser to go to a certain URL with a single click. If there's a site that they use a lot, for example a search engine or a news site, it allows the user to navigate to that site quickly and easily. Such a site is sometimes referred to as a "home page". Often the user probably wants to configure the browser to open that same home page when they open a new window or tab.

That said, the opinions expressed so far just go to show how subjective "User Experience" is.

For me, the home button is extremely useful. It's probably the button I click on most - or at least it would be, if it still existed.

For users who are happy to let some other service guess and suggest which sites they may want to visit ("Top Sites" or something like that) I guess they dont't see a need for a Home button. But surely there are other users like me that want to be able to control what their software does for them. I find it extremely annoying that this seemingly obvious functionality is missing in the browsers I use. (Not a good user experience at all.)

Also, someone mentioned that setting the home button to Google is likely not useful. I disagree. Sure, I can set my default search engine to Google, and type the things I want to search for in the URL field at the top. But there are lots of other things on the Google home page that I like to access. And I never liked the idea of merging together URL navigation with search. If I want to go to http://foo.bar.com I want the browser to go there - I don't want to invoke a search engine. Conversely, if I want to search for references to foo.bar.com then that's what I want to do - I don't necessarily want to visit that site.

I think the difference of opinion is between those users who want to be able to control what the software does, versus those users who want the software to guess what they want and try to do it for them. I despise the latter approach.

Duncan

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