Comment 10 for bug 390724

Look I am not on a personal crusade to get a bigger back button :D

It's just that when I saw this 100 bugs project, it made me think, this is EXACTLY what Ubuntu needed since its a little rough around the edges, these are the sort of things that affect the perception of people as to whether or not Ubuntu is a polished product.

Design consistency is a very basic design principle and one that everyone should be able to understand. The fact that right now it is inconsistent cannot be disputed for the reasons I have already outlined above.

But this issue is not only to do with design or UI, rather it is also a much bigger usability issue. See this to get all technical about the issue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts_law

To experienced UI designers, the current Nautilus window will immediately standout as wierd. It's not just that the back button is small, its more to do with the fact that it is smallER than the other buttons despite being one of the most important (if not the most important) on that toolbar. What further violates the law is that totally redundant or little used buttons such as STOP, RELOAD and HOME are much bigger than it. This is not just personal preference, the stop/reload buttons are fairly redundant in a file browser, they could become more important while browsing over the network (local or wide area) but even then they would never be used as often as BACK. Similarly HOME is made redundant by the side pane showing the file directory.

Hope that is sufficient detail to get this rectified in 9.10