Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem
I think it was borrowed from Android, where there is always a system Back button available, even when there is nothing to go back to, which does not make a lot of sense.
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It was fairly obviously borrowed from web browsers. You'll note that rule one of web app development is "NEVER BREAK THE BACK BUTTON": it's the most heavily used button in the UI for a reason.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem
Yes, there are some use cases that were permitted by the ancient UI and are no longer supported. But they're edge cases, like jumping around in dictionaries.
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And, say, going back if you moved around in periodicals. Or going back more than one hop if you did a search and then did another search, or did an x-ray hop and then a search. Oh and don't forget that sometimes the back button takes you to the book you just left and sometimes (say, in some but not all searches according to a rule I still haven't figured out but might be something like whether it was a 'search everywhere' or not), it takes you outside the book entirely and you need to hit the X on the upper right to return to the book (the same button which in other situations takes you outside the book entirely!). The new UI's approach to navigation is wildly irregular, ridiculously frustrating, and generally horrible.
Anecdata: two older members of my family have given up reading more than one book on the Kindle because they can't figure out how to drive the UI at all. i.e. they literally use the Kindle like a paper book in that it only shows one book and if they want to read another one they *wait until I'm in the area so they can ask me to do it*, even though I live 200 miles away. They no longer dare search or navigate at all because they don't know how to get back now the back button is gone. They could drive the old UI easily, and the UI of every Kindle back to the Kindle Keyboard, but the new one confounds them.
An own goal by Amazon, since that means that at least one heavy book buyer has been efficiently converted by their own dreadful UI design into someone that never buys Kindle books at all. And she's not the only one: similar stories abound.