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Comment by ClayFerguson | Hacker News Reader

I tried to reply to your post replying to this about using BACK button, but that is also a disaster for apps. Back button is NEVER used in SPAs. Anyway HN is not showing me a reply button so I can't reply to your actual post to the child node of this.

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False. It's relatively easy for SPAs to handle the back button gracefully, you can change the URL to indicate the state of the app and add it to the browser history, listen for url change events to then change the state, etc. Grooveshark handled them just fine, you could even copy/paste a song, artist, album, playlist, etc url directly into url bar for the already open app and it would open the appropriate page without doing a refresh and interrupting your playback experience. However, even if the back button were as terrible as you say for SPAs, that would be a mark against SPAs not browsers or the back button, which is of great utility, which is why those pesky users insist on pressing it.

Out of the browser navigation facilities, the back button is the best understood feature. Users know how to use it, and what it should do.

Perhaps, where this goes is that Single Page Apps and web browsers aren't a good fit together?

We all know the web was invented for static document browsing, and that was the REASON the back button was invented. Nowadays with Javascript everywhere on all devices everyone is writing APPS that run in the browser. It is simply bad design to have those apps rely on a browser-level back button, for anything at all, because the back button assumes your previous URL 10 seconds ago was different, and that's a very stupid assumption. If you can define what "back" even means in a way that applies to all APPs go for it. You can't. It's a nonsensical type of question for an APP.

As they said, perhaps browsers and SPA's aren't a good fit. It's not a good idea to have a control on screen that will potentially break the app. If you want to run in a browser environment then you need to adhere to the browser environment.

What most SPAs/apps do is 'tolerate' clicks on the back button, by taking you to some reasonable prior place, within the same site/app. Now that I think about it more, i might even support this in meta64 just to appease the masses. I could just make it where it sets the url to the NODE-permalink (maybe changing the hash part only), so that if some rogue person hits the browser back button they just to go whatever prior node they were looking at before. You talked me into it. thanks.

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