Breadcrumbs Navigation instead of Buttons

@Ilia,

I was thinking, wouldn’t it be better where as presently the UI uses a lot of “buttons” for navigation in the main window.

Screenshot from 2024-11-07 10-55-59

What if we changed to a “Breadcrumb” style at the top of the page like:

Dashboard > Virtual Servers > Edit Virtual Server > Edit Users

Just a though…

+1 for that however this may take some work across the whole gui as some buttons are not quite a breadcrumb in some situations

Well, those buttons don’t exactly reflect the nested pages. I think we should keep it as is…

Maybe have the breadcrumbs as well, useful for pasting into the forum.

Pfsense uses this heavily and it is very helpful for me.

However if this was a feature in the future when/if theming mechanism is changed I would be ok with that.

Which is sometimes worse. :wink:

I’m never sure whether I’ll go back to the page I came from or back to the top of the module. I’d prefer back one level.

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Precisely. (sometimes words can get lost in translation) but buttons have clarity. (they are obvious visually)

being a windows user I would prefer a back button/breadcrumb.
but it does seem to be trivial in the scheme of things - especially if it is a lot of work!

I don’t think it would be trivial to implement, especially since I don’t find breadcrumbs all that useful.

My reference to “trivial” was not about the amount of effort required to refactor about every page of the GUI.

it was more about the importance of making such a change.

If the buttons irritate you with where they take you your browser has a back button with multiple page history.

Where would you expect this to take you? Back to where you were?
I

Fair enough, IF you hover over it long enough you get a tool tip. But that isn’t normal GUI behavior. It looks like a back button. This particular function seems to be applied unevenly. If you adopt the bread crumb philosophy it would always take you up a level.

Yes, I know there are two more buttons below that give you an option. So why the third? Like I said, this is just the first module I checked for an example. The behavior is all over the place and fragmented. The top button, if it is going to exist, should always have the same behavior. Intuitively, that is ‘back’.

If a button takes you somewhere you didn’t expect to be doesn’t the browser back twice take you back to where you were?

sadly, this is not reliable.

just try for example, switching between domains you currently have the Dashboard showing for domain 1 you switch to domain 2 and the Virtual Server Summary page is displayed. (slightly annoying)

click “Back” and you get the Dashboard for domain 2
the history is lost - the only way “back” to domain 1 is to change servers again. (then only to the page that is currently displayed)

(I have no idea if this is also the case with Mac users)

It is why I keep multiple browser windows open.

So leave broken behavior because there are other ways around it? Does that really make sense to you? Yes, an un-labeled button that looks like a back button is broken behavior. Not really a discussion to be had about this.

I have lived with this but only bring it up because it now seems open for discussion. Again, this behavior is not consistent throughout the modules which makes it broken.

But to the thread topic, that solves all of this and gives you finer granularity over your navigation choices.

I was trying to point out that, on the contrary, I don’t find this change important enough to justify investing time and effort into it.