Don't get me wrong. I like Safari. I use it almost every day. But some things about it just irritate me again and again and again...

First, the 'back' button.

The problem here is that Apple have decided to merge the 'back' function and the 'back history' popup-menu into one toolbar button.

If I quickly click the button and release, then I go back to the previous page. So far so good.

If I click and hold the button, then the history menu appears (after a delay). That's OK too. I can drag down to the page I want, release and whoosh... I'm off on my way. The trouble starts when I held the mouse button down a fraction too long, and I really wanted just the 'back' function. In this case, I expect that releasing the mouse button should activate the 'back' button. But no! Releasing the mouse button just makes the popup menu go away... I'm back to square one! Grrr! Ok, so all I need to do is quickly click again, and I get the back function.

It gets worse. If I click on the button too long for the 'back' function, but not long enough for the popup menu, then a third mode appears. When I release the button, the popup menu appears! This time it's in the Windows-style click-click mode. If I want to go back from here, I'm screwed. When I quickly click the mouse button a second time, all that happens is that the popup menu goes away. After two clicks, I'm back to square one! I'm forced to click the button a third time before the bloody thing will finally take me back to the previous page!

This behaviour is utterly infuriating. The time difference between the click lengths required to produce these three behaviours is tiny. There's no visual cue to tell you which mode it's in. Often I'm just reduced to frantically clicking the mouse until it does what I want.

Is this just me? No! I've observed other people having this difficulty. So surely Apple must have noticed that their 'back' button is hard to use? Why haven't they fixed it?