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

  • officermike@lemmy.world
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    10 days 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.world
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      10 days 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

  • The Pantser@lemmy.world
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    10 days 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.world
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      10 days 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.world
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        10 days 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.world
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          10 days 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.world
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            9 days 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.world
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              8 days 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.world
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                8 days 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.world
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    10 days 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.

    • IndiBrony@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      That’s actually how I do my Lemmy feed. I have one chance to comment on a thread and if I don’t do it, when the page refreshes I lose it forever.

      I’ve learned to accept that there are just some things the universe never wanted me to comment on.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      9 days ago

      Youtube recommended videos does this. Not a huge issue because I can always search for the video myself but it’s annoying.

  • RedStrider@lemmy.world
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    9 days 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.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      9 days ago

      Only the first time you visit in a while though.

      I think it’s taking you away to a login page, logging you in, then bringing you back.

      I can see the point if you were going to ask or answer a question, but 99% of the time you just want to see how somebody else didn’t get their problem solved by some random Indian guy who people assume works for Microsoft, who think the solution to everything is running “sfc /scannow” which has replaced chkdsk as the command most likely to take a long time, do nothing, and make the question asker go away without a solution to their problem.

  • foggy@lemmy.world
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    10 days 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.

      • mrvictory1@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        MS makes a redirect to log you in, you can hit back button twice to escape. Bad design but not malice.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      10 days 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

    • ajikeshi@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

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

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    This is one of the absolute greatest reasons to support opening most everything in a new tab (as long as you don’t end up like my mom who at one point had over 100 tabs on her phone). Doesn’t matter if it’s a link from the same website, from a search engine, or whatever else there is. New tab.

    • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      Then on android Firefox you accidentally hit the back button and it closes the tab and you can’t go forward and you already navigatedc away from the originating page on the other tab forcing you to open your history and try to figure out where the hell it is.

      • ChanchoManco@lemm.ee
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        9 days ago

        Ctrl Shift T doesn’t work on that case?

        Edit: I skipped the Android bit, sorry.

        Edit 2: From the 3 dots menu INSIDE the tabs view you can access a list of recently closed tabs, not nearly as fast as a 3 key combo, but maybe better than looking for the tab in the history. Also apparently there’s an extension that may help.

  • Katana314@lemmy.world
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    9 days 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.

    • Robert7301201@slrpnk.net
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      9 days ago

      We just got vertical align last month. There’s so many things they should be working on but are too busy trying to add more ads or monetization features.

      I think the web is just too long in the tooth at this point but there’s nothing we can do.

      • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        CSS features like vertical alignment would be defined by web standards. Those fall under the non-profit org W3C. They’re pretty slow about things as to not break the fuck out of everything.

        Browser behaviour like merging redirects falls on browsers tho, so yeah, we can blame Chrome or FF on that one.

        • Overshoot2648@lemm.ee
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          9 days ago

          Still waiting for CSS Color 4 so SVG gradients don’t look like shit. sRGB gradients are completely broken.

  • ober9000@lemmy.world
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    9 days 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.

  • TedZanzibar@feddit.uk
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    10 days ago

    You’ve reminded me of a similar frustration that I’ve never found the answer to - though it may be adblock related - in that whenever I open a link to eBay it completely wipes the history for that tab. Or possibly it opens a new tab and kills the parent. Either way I always forget about it until the next time and then it drives me mad all over again.

    • deejay4am@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      Reddit has been doing this when I click a result from a Google search (yeah, sometimes you have to)

      It’s fucking annoying and I hope whatever JavaScript trick lets them do this gets blocked