Browsing is challenging in Music Store

Reassigning to libubuntuone, since it's the U1MS widget which isn't exposing the functions you want

We have a back link on the music store page, as well as a home link. About forward and refresh, I am not sure. Maybe forward is ok, but I can't see what you need 'Refresh' for. This is not a web browser, it's a UI that, as an implementation detail, uses a web page to display the information, so we don't want to provide a web browser's functionalities in it.

I see what you mean, though when I use it in Banshee (don't know about other music players), I know I'm using a webpage because it FEELS like a webpage, and I expect it to do things that webpages/browsers can do. On the other hand, I see what you mean about not wanting to reinvent features of the browser within a website.

But when I'm using it, I constantly DO want to be able to refresh for all the same reasons that I want to refresh on a browser: the page doesn't always load correctly; I want to see if something has changed in the download progress bar; the connection is dropped; I'm waiting for something to happen on the server side (like the music getting transfered to u1 from 7d; etc.

As for forward, if it feels like a website, people are going to go looking for the forward button. When it's not there, we're going to get frustrated. I know what was my experience.

As for the back button, and the home buttons, it took me eons to find them because they aren't native icons, and because I don't look for browser controls within the website itself. They're elegant and subtle, but they took me FOREVER to find. So long that I decided they must not exist, and that I should file a bug.

Another example of a related problem. If you decide to pay by paypal, and are redirected to the paypal screen, you lose the back buttons at the top. So....now I'm about to pay, but - say I decide I'd rather pay by credit card - I don't know how to get back to where I was. There's a link that says "Cancel and return to 7digital," but clicking it returns an error from Paypal.

You don't need to refresh the downloads page, it uses javascript to update the progress bars.

The only thing that I agree you with is about the paypal page not having a way to get back to the music store. We'll see how we can solve this, but we really don't want to be showing back/home/forward buttons, then people would think they are in a browser, when they are not, since it won't behave like a web browser

This makes sense from a design perspective. I'll be interested to see how well this works moving forward. It uses so many of the design patterns of the web (like links and webpages) that I find it hard to break the habits I have when browsing the web.

Like, I want to open pages in new tabs, I want to refresh pages to see if they've changed, I want to go forward and backwards...because I can see that such things are possible. Yet, it's HTML being used as a GUI (at least in principle), so it doesn't have these capabilities exposed.

Anyway, yeah, the paypal screen is a real problem, and I'll watch for others of the kind, but I can see why the full features aren't planned to be implemented.

Setting this to Won't Fix as we don't simply want to end up trying to embed a web browser exprience inside music players. If there are more specific issues with downloads, payments, and other parts of the site that are troublesome though, we'd like to know so that we can work on fixing them appropriately without having to provide workarounds such as browser navigation buttons.

There is another bug already filed for the PayPal navigation issue. It is bug #613261 . Thanks for using the store!