Show HN: Space Invaders in the URL | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Space Invaders in the URL

arnaud.at

38 pointsarnaudsm21 comments

WARNING: this completely obliterates your browser history. Open this only in a private browsing widow.

Flagged. This doesn’t belong on the front page.

I am sorry about that, it was just a funny experiment.

I thought it was acceptable considering that you accepted a similar post 6 months ago, which stayed on the frontpage for a long time : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19679890

I really like your experiment - but you should put it behind the landing page which explains the consequences for the browsing history and recommends using a private tab. Then its absolutely ok and should be posted again on HN.

Your experiment is definitely fun and interesting but has pretty annoying side effects, like dumping dozens of entries in the browser history and making the back button unusable. Some people don’t mind, others do.

Its interesting to me how many people complain about the history / request a back button / link.

I agree that sites shouldn't break history but tabs have made the back button almost obsolete to me.

Everything is middle clicked for new tab / middle clicked away when done.

I messed around with the site. Middle clicked it away and ended up here as I'd opened the comments in a new tab before I started. Didn't even notice the history issue.

Indeed, in my normal browsing habits, I rarely rely on the back button, as it usually forces a page reload which is very slow. Like you, I am using a stack of tabs instead. On mobile though, I use the back button more, as tab creation is not as easy (why no browser does this with a 2-finger tab, I don't understand).

However, the side effect of this goes much further, it also hoses your browsing history, and sometimes you really need that. So while this is a cool hack, there shouldn't be a direct link on the HN front page.

Have you ever browsed on mobile?

Ha. Pretty awesome. No luck using the back button to get back to Hacker News, but I guess that's unsurprising.

Cool! Firefox on mobile doesn't render the emojis though, just long strings of Unicode strings.

Please remove the direct link from the front page as it has negative effects on the browser due to screwing up the browser history. This link should be embedded in the post with a proper warning.

For those on desktop Safari: You have to enable "Show full website address" in its "advanced" settings tab

I couldn’t figure out how to do this on Chrome for iOS. The relevant flag does not seem to exist.

Quite confused on iphone safari and then to find the back history was hijacked as an integral component of this game

Very nice! However breaking the back button is very bad UX (remember ad-stuffed pages that would not let go back to google). I think it should be possible to change the hash without adding a new page by not using history API.

They are using location.hash.

history.replaceState() wouldn't break the back button, but apparently history API is throttled in some browsers; see the "One Last Thing" section on https://matthewrayfield.com/articles/animating-urls-with-jav... .

I should have known better to click this link

Cool stuff. A back button/link would be nice though.

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