Websites that hijack your back button must stop by June 15 or face Google's wrath

Comments

• TheMinions@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Learn.Microsoft.com is going to be pissed.

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  • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    In fact, most of the time I run into this it’s big corps who should know better, but don’t.

    They won’t delist LinkedIn and Microsoft and Reddit. They just paid billions for Reddit content feeds.

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  • WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    So is SFGate. I can’t even bother with their bullshit articles anymore. You have to click back 3 TIMES just to get out.

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• lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’ll expand here what I mentioned in another comm.

  Most back button hijacking relies on the browser history API. Further info here: “The replaceState() method of the History interface modifies the current history entry, replacing it with the state object and URL passed in the method parameters.”

  So for example. You visited site A, then site B. Your browser stores this as “user went A then B”, so if you click the “back” button while navigating B, it sends you back to A. However Javascript in the site B can tell your browser “no, the user didn’t visit A then B. They visited C then B”. So as you click “back” you’re sent to a third site you never visited.

  Why is this anti-feature there on first place? Why are sites even allowed to interact with your history? Because corporations really, really, really want to know your browsing history: which sites are directing traffic to it site, which pages within that site you visited (imagine those pages show you products you might potentially buy), so goes on. It has practically no reason to exist for non-commercial sites. Now remember Google is a corporation, it profits the most from advertisement, and has a role in the web standards, and you’ll notice Google was at least partially responsible for this anti-feature.

  And now, the same Google is using its monopoly over search to dictate which should be the rules for the usage of the anti-feature it added. As if the internet was Google’s property: it’s who decides which features should be on the internet, and how you’re allowed to use them.

  Moral of the story is: even if it looks like Google is doing something good, remember they were responsible for this mess on first place.

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  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Why is this anti-feature there on first place?

    I thought it was there because otherwise, single page applications (e.g. Angular) wouldn’t have a functioning back button? Am I misunderstanding this?

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    • lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Single page applications are only a necessity because pages are expected to be huge behemoths, so requesting a new page would take too long and put a burden on the server. And that is mostly the result of corporations bloating their sites with advertisement, to the point our expectations on what’s an acceptable page size became distorted.

      (Note Angular was released by Google in 2016, and the anti-feature is from 2015. I don’t think this is a coincidence.)

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    • traxex@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You are correct. I’m against web tracking but this isn’t the crazy feature the other poster is going on about.

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• tiramichu@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Google actually doing something good for once?

  Oh, right. Not being able to press back prevents you going back to google.

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• Ildsaye@hexbear.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  catgirl-huh Why would a browser give a site the ability to do this in the first place?

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  • traxex@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    There’s quite a few reasons why having the ability to change the history of a particular browser session can be helpful. The major one is handling user flow in single page applications where the browser doesn’t see page changes but the application does so you add history despite a new page not being completely rendered. Thus it gives the illusion of moving pages and changing URLs without burdening the browser with the action. It’s a pretty integral feature and there are plenty of sites that make it malicious.

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    • Ildsaye@hexbear.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s asinine. The outcome of browsers giving incompetent designers enough access to muddy the function of users’ back buttons was predictable from the start.

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• TDCN@feddit.dk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  If only they would obliterate Facebook then! Facebook is notorious for doing this when getting to forum posts from google and I’m trying to go back to google, and it it pisses me off.

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• haxboar@hexbear.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  lol, I’ll believe it when I see it. Something tells me that there’s gonna be a list of “approved” websites, that also just so happen to increase their adsense buys around the same time…

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• RunawayFixer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I wish that the back button would send me back to the page + page position that I was on when I (the user) clicked a link or entered a form. I’ve never had a desire to revisit automatic redirect pages, so imo default behaviour should be to send the user back to the point of the previous user action. To me this seems easy and logical to implement, but I’ve never seen it, so maybe I’m missing something and it’s not that easy.

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  • InFerNo@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That sounds like default behaviour, at least in Firefox, if a websites loaded as a static page and doesn’t dynamically load its content after page load.

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    • sukhmel@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Since they mentioned redirect, I think they take an issue with the scenario of ‘click → more pages load and redirect you after each load → back’ that will repeatedly land you on just the last redirect page and then promptly redirect you forward to the newest page you tried to go back from

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    • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      If it’s default behaviour for static pages, but not for dynamic pages, then it’s not much of a default. As a user I want ui actions to be consistent, the unknown stuff that happens in the background shouldn’t change the behaviour of the ui. Firefox now mostly gets around this issue by opening search engine links in new tabs (I can’t recall if that’s standard for Firefox or if I had to change settings, but I’ve been using it for years like that), but this wouldn’t have been needed if using the back button was reliable.

      I found this 2022-2024 discussion with a few examples of the back button not working as expected: connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/…/4678

      I found no announcements of a fix. I also haven’t had much occasion of noticing a fix, since new pages open in a separate tab for me.

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• Blackout@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Except Facebook right?

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• Lojcs@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  So is google banning single page applications or just the malicious behavior described? Hate when their announcements are so cryptic

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  • I_am_10_squirrels@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Single page application should be blocked. Give me real links.

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    • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      As long as it pretends that it has multiple pages, I don’t see the harm. Not re-fetching and re-rendering navigation elements is a good thing, and you don’t have to break the back button, address bar, and so on to do it.

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• nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Tldr?

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  • slazer2au@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Pressing the back button must take you back to the previous page you were on or else google will lower your page rating.

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  • doc@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It's a rather short article...

    (N)TL;DR: back should mean back. Sites that continue to make back do something else will get lower rankings in search results, which means reduced traffic and revenue.

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• 73QjabParc34Vebq@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Google has users still? Less tech savvy people have been hijacked by Bing, more techavvy people have bailed years ago. Right?

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  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The least tech-savvy people don’t use Windows, but Android or iOS, where Bing isn’t the default search engine. (Slightly more tech-savvy ones may also use Chrome on Windows.)

    As a tech-savvy person I still use Google a lot because DDG just doesn’t give equally good results much of the time. There are many web pages that are indexed by Google, but not DDG.

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    • scintilla@crust.piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I highly recommend kagi if you can justify the cost. It is genuinely how Google used to be in terms of search quality.

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  • morto@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Google has 89% of the web search marketshare according to statcounter

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• possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Why am I suddenly seeing hexbear here

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  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Wdym “suddenly”? Checking my user profile on hexbear it appears that my posts to lemmy.zip communities have been federating there for a long time. Your instance doesn’t seem to defederate them, don’t know if it ever did; mine certainly doesn’t and I don’t remember a time when it ever did.

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