I think it's 100% unlikely that they got negative feedback about SnapBack...
Whence comes such certainty? Even the National Weather Service meteorlogists were only 90% certain we'd get snow heading into the blizzard we'll be digging out from all morning here.
That aside, I think it's likely that the elimination of SnapBack and its associated code was done in order to accommodate the relocation of the Reload/Stop button and Progress indicator to the right-hand end of the Address field.
Since we don't have access to internal discussions about Safari features and the implementation thereof, it's hard to say how arbitrary that relocation was. (I certainly didn't like it at the time, but now that I'm used to it, I find myself looking in the address bar for
Camino's Stop/Reload buttons.) But if you
stipulate to the relocation, then it's easy to see that the presence of the SnapBack button there as well would require an untenably complex set of user interface procedures of the sort which are anathema to the Apple design philosophy.
As for what made SnapBack expendable, I'd guess that you're correct that it didn't get a lot of positive feedback. I think one reason for that, beyond the lack of an Apple-provided forum for the expression of same, is that most folks simply weren't aware of its functionality, for two major reasons:
- the SnapBack button itself appeared and disappeared with the changing context of the browsing session (similar to the way Back and Forward arrows dim), which discouraged users from forming an understanding of its functionality through empirical observation;
- a majority of the type of user for whom SnapBack might have been a natural fit had already implemented its essential functionality much earlier by establishing the habit of preserving pages/tabs which represented significant branching nodes in the navigational tree by opening links contained in such pages/tabs in new pages/tabs.
