Breadcrumb navigation

The term alludes to the trail of bread crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the German fairy tale.

[3] They may be implemented with each part of the trail having a drop-down menu of its own, as well as drag and drop support, as done in Windows Explorer.

A breadcrumb trail or path based on viewing history is typically rendered as follows: For instance, in this scenario, a website visitor views seven pages (note how the pages are tracked in the order the user viewed them): Typical breadcrumbs following a hierarchical structure are shown as follows: Current file managers including Linux Mint's Nemo, Windows Explorer (from Windows Vista onwards), Finder (for Macintosh operating systems), GNOME's Nautilus, KDE's Dolphin, Xfce's Thunar, MATE's Caja, and SnowBird allow breadcrumb navigation, often replacing or extending an address bar.

Some commentators and programmers alternatively use the term "cookie crumb" as a synonym to describe the navigation design.

Michigan Community College's Virtual Learning Collaborative uses the term "Navigation Path",[7] as do some Drupal users.

Demo of breadcrumb navigation.
KDE's Dolphin (file manager), demonstrating its implementation of location-based breadcrumb navigation in the "usr", "local" and "etc" folder buttons. The arrows can also be clicked to expand selection.