Learn.Microsoft.com is going to be pissed.
Websites that hijack your back button must stop by June 15 or face Google's wrath
Submitted 6 hours ago by schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de to technology@lemmy.zip
Comments
TheMinions@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 hours ago
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 5 hours 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.
WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.world 5 hours 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.
tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
Google actually doing something good for once?
Oh, right. Not being able to press back prevents you going back to google.
haxboar@hexbear.net 5 hours 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…
Blackout@fedia.io 5 hours ago
Except Facebook right?
nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de 6 hours ago
Tldr?
slazer2au@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Pressing the back button must take you back to the previous page you were on or else google will lower your page rating.
doc@fedia.io 5 hours 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.
73QjabParc34Vebq@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
Google has users still? Less tech savvy people have been hijacked by Bing, more techavvy people have bailed years ago. Right?
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 5 hours 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.
scintilla@crust.piefed.social 3 hours ago
I highly recommend kagi if you can justify the cost. It is genuinely how Google used to be in terms of search quality.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 hours 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.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 4 hours ago
I thought it was there because otherwise, single page applications (e.g. Angular) wouldn’t have a functioning back button? Am I misunderstanding this?
lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 hours 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.)