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Google Working on Blocking Back Button Hijacking in Chrome (zdnet.com)
Google engineers are currently working on a Chrome browser update that will block malicious websites from hijacking the browser's history and, indirectly, the Back button. From a report: The issue at hand is a well-known tactic often seen employed by many shady sites across the Internet. A user would visit a website, then he'd accidentally click or tap on an ad, and be taken to a new page. But when the user presses the Back button to go back to the previous page, the browser just reloads the same page over and over again, keeping the user trapped on the ad page. [...] Recent source code updates to the Chromium project, the open-source browser engine behind the Chrome browser, reveal that Google engineers are planning to crack down on this type of abusive behavior. These code updates will allow Chrome to detect when browser history entries have been generated by user interaction, or by an automated method.
That's fine when every click loads a new page, but If a click simply loads new content into the same page, it makes sense to tweak the history in those cases to make the back button work as expected.
I have encountered several fairly well-known news sites that fool with the back button, making it difficult to back up past their home page.
Even more than this, I would love to see the browser people find a way to absolutely, positively block auto-play videos. The one at the top of a news story is irritating, but when you scroll past it and a little clone of the window pops up in the right margin and starts playing it really gets on my nerves.
Since the first time I loaded up Mosaic, I have expected the back button to take me back. Not sideways.
If you're using AJAX within a webpage though, sometimes you expect the back button to take you to what you were previously viewing NOT make you leave the site altogether. If a single page is dynamically updating content based upon what you click on, you probably want script manipulation of the back button.
Example, I have a table of widgets- I click on a widget and it loads details (you haven't changed website or been forwarded to a new address)... if you click the back button you probably want it to return you to the table; not have it exit the webpage completely. There are times you don't want the back button to actually take you back to the real actual previous webpage.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
This isn't talkong about an Angular app with routing that uses back properly. It is talking about automatic redirects like HTTP 301 or meta refresh tags. For those the sokution is easy, Firefox has done this for years. If you hit back, and the page then auto-redirects you immediately, ignore the redirect. The user then just has to hit back a few times, but at least they aren't stuck. Even better would be if hitting back went back to the most recent page that did not have an automatic redirect in it.
I also understand that the browser allows you to modify how things like the back button work. I just personally wouldn't build important functionality in my site around something the browser normally controls, and wouldn't be terribly surprised if it stopped working the way I'd originally intended after a browser update.
Well, the answer is you don't build important functionality into the back-button, you give other options and try to get the user to use those other options for navigating; HOWEVER, you can't control a user and can't prevent them clicking the back-button if they really want to (all you can do is try to handle it gracefully if they do). In an ideal world the end-user wouldn't use the back button from navigating in a web-application; but you can't easily prevent them.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
And then in that case, you take control of the back button so it doesn't break the experience.
No, in that case you provide a clearly marked Back button or link as part of YOUR interface. If necessary, you add a brief explanation as to why YOUR back button is better in the current context than the browser's Back button. Don't be messing with MY interface - Home, Forward, Back, and Stop buttons. When you screw with those, you've 'broken the experience' by definition, you've created non-standard behaviour, and you've pissed me off to the extent that your site is on my shitlist and I won't be visiting it again.
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