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.

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.

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.

I don't understand why browsers support this "functionality".

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.

Microsoft does this with the Xbox forums and it bothers me so much

Open all links in new tabs.

Couldn't be me. Opening links in a new tab master race

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.

Oh man I hate this shit so much.

Added to my blocked websites

Firefox should really implement a feature that hides this bullshit from the previous sites menu

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.

microsoft does this with their community support/forums/whatever and it's annoying when you're trying to look up a problem in google. :///

I've always wondered. Is there really a benefit to a ton of redirects like that? Like, do they gain anything by making it harder to back out?

Or is it just extremely incompetent website programming?

Holy smokes I never realized this intended behaviour, but of couse it is...

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.

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.

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.

just click again, but fast enough to get the redirect, but not too fast to miss it and double click, and try not to do it a third time or you're going back a few ages.

MASSIVELY infuriating.

"mildly" infuriating

I think there was an extension named Skip Redirect that solved this issue...