Click a link and need to go back 10x to get back. Yes, I enjoy the footballs.

  • officermike@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1111·
    2 months ago

    Yeah, I also hate back-button hijacking. I suspect some websites do it to artificially force more page views for ad revenue. Try a long-press on the back button to view the history for that browser tab and click on the most recent page you think won’t redirect.

    • Valmond@lemmy.worldEnglish
      123·
      2 months ago

      Youtube does it, and it just continues to blast the wrong video you accidentally just auto-started because instead if fucking off, it shows other videos with the bad video getting just reduced.

      Aaargh for the state of todays internet

    • where_am_i@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      I hate that this is even a feature in the web standard. A result of some massive corporate corruption for sure.

      • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        I recently looked into this after it seemed like Facebook messed with my back button on a private mobile window:

        Someone pointed out that it’s nice to have, for example, your email provider know that you probably want to go back for a message to your inbox instead of going back to the previous page.

        But what if browsers monitored which sites abused the feature and showed a pop-up when you click the back button, just like they offer to show you notifications? They could show you:

        This site has been reported to hijack the back button. Would you like to go back to the last domain that you visited?

        and offer to remember the setting.

  • The Pantser@lemmy.worldEnglish
    572·
    2 months ago

    This could easily be fixed by the browsers but they don’t. Sure wish these back button tricks would stop. Especially news sites try to keep you from getting back to your search and makes your page refresh over and over. I wonder if that behavior counts as hits to their advertisers.

    • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      2 months ago

      I don’t know about “easily.” replaceState() is actually intended to make single-page apps easier to use, by allowing you to use your back button as expected even when you’re staying on the same URL the entire time.

      Likewise, single-page apps are intended to be faster and more efficient than downloading a new static page that’s 99.9% identical to the old one every time you change something.

      Fixing this bad experience would eliminate the legitimate uses of replaceState().

      Now, what they could do is track your browser history “canonically” and fork it off whenever Javascript alters its state, and then allow you to use a keyboard shortcut (Alt + Back, perhaps?) to go to the “canonical” previous item in history instead of to the “forked” previous item.

      • deejay4am@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        2 months ago

        Pop a window open with a your app in it (with the user’s permission) without a back button if you want that.

        A web page should be a document, not an experience.

        • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          2 months ago

          That would absolutely make everything worse, no question; the web should be more integrated, not less. We shouldn’t incentivize even more companies to silo off their content into apps.

          • ggppjj@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            I think the word ‘app’ was being used in place of ‘webapp’ there, which is the general target audience for this feature.

            • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              2 months ago

              Yes, I think you’re correct, but using browsers to coerce the web back into static documents will result in companies creating their own apps so that they can continue to deliver experiences. And the past 10+ years has shown that users will absolutely follow them.

              • ggppjj@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                2 months ago

                Sorry, this comment was mainly just providing the previous user with a correction because they seemed to think that the other person that they were replying to was talking about forcing people to use phone apps, which I assume we all agree is bad and would likely work if there were a concentrated push for it.

                Concerning your points after “using the browser”: I want websites to use replaceState and manage their own intra-page navigation with a cookie. They can still intercept the back button as they do now, but they should only get the single history entry until they switch to a new page, if they ever do.

  • randon31415@lemmy.worldEnglish
    47·
    2 months ago

    Also: Algorithmic generated feeds where you try to click on one thing, but you click on the next thing in the list and when you click back, the feed looks completely different because it has new information on you. That thing you wanted to click on is gone and will never return.

  • ‮redirtSdeR@lemmy.worldEnglish
    382·
    2 months ago

    I was just thinking about this.

    Super annoying because it can actually be fixed by using History.replaceState() over History.pushState().

    I guess the reason they do it is either to keep you stuck on their sucky site, or just incompetence.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      It’s a very “dumb” implementation of a generally useful feature. Browsers don’t keep track of how many times you’re redirected to the same site or try to consolidate the back-button list accordingly, but they certainly could. Wouldn’t be surprised if there was a plugin to this effect.

  • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    2 months ago

    Three things.

    1. Yes. Sometimes this is malice. Sometimes this is an attempt to drive impressions and page views.

    2. This can also be caused by poorly configured web applications that update in real time. If, say, some sports website is giving you real-time data about the game as it progresses, a poorly configured web application might be creating a dynamic URL for every change. When you access the older page, it will be instructed to take you to the most recent data, so pressing back is taking you to old data on that page, and then immediately realizing that data is old so refreshing it with the most relevant data.

    3. This is a super common misconfiguration in single page web applications. Domain.com will take you to an application that renders at domain.com/en-us/home. Pressing back takes you to domain.com, and guess what happens next?

    This is basically 99.99% of these cases. I would say if its on some shitty news site with 1000 ads that somehow sneak by AdBlock and UBlok Origin, it’s case 1. Otherwise, it’s case 2 or 3.

    The picture instance is either case 1 or 2.

    • ajikeshi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      and neither case provides a service in a state that should be exposed to the outside. Either due to malice or incompetence.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      2 months ago

      Any website managed/developed by someone certified in the last decade or more knows not to do that.

      It’s absolutely malicious, both to drive SRO and to keep “accidental” clicks from backing out so quickly

  • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
    141·
    2 months ago

    What makes me angry here is, I am 90% sure the browsers could code against this.

    If the user clicks a control on a webpage one time, the stack can declare “One user click! You have earned yourself One (1) navigation.” Then, the click activates some JavaScript that moves you to a new webpage. That new webpage has an auto-loader redirect that instead runs a 300ms timeout, and then takes you to some other page. The browser, meanwhile, has seen this, and establishes “We are still only operating off of that One (1) click. So, instead of adding a new page to the user history, we’ll replace that first navigation.”

    I have yet to hear a satisfactory reason as to why that’s not possible.

  • ober9000@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    2 months ago

    Aren’t they scamming their advertisers too? Because if you click the back button a bunch of times it’s gonna reload a bunch of them on every click. At least if your internet is fast enough.

  • TriflingToad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    2 months ago

    yo honk honk am here to help. Right click the back button to bring up a menu of several previous pages select when it was the search engine or whatever you used before. For Firefox. If you’re on chrome, you can cry. Honk honk, goose out.