Using Back, Forward, and History buttons

The Back and Forward buttons maintain a history of your current Web-browsing session. A session starts when you first open your Web browser. The session ends when you close your Web browser. For this reason, the Back button is always disabled (dimmed) when you first open your browser. That's because there's no page to go back to when you first open your browser. But as soon as you go to another page, the Back button is enabled so that you can click it to return to the previous page.

Tip You can also press the Backspace key to go back to the previous page.

The Forward button is disabled until you've clicked Back at least once. When the Forward button is enabled, you can click it to return to the page where you clicked the Back button.

Clicking the little arrow to the right of the Forward button displays a menu of pages you've visited recently. Click any page in that list to return to it. Or click History at the bottom of the menu to see the History pane. The History pane shows a more extensive list of recently visited Web sites. Click any one to expand it to see pages within the site you've been to lately. Click any page under the heading to go to the page.

To delete a link from the History pane, right-click it and choose Delete. To close the History pane so that it's out of your way, click the X button near its upper-right corner.