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Comment by ivanstojic | Hacker News Reader

When I land on the page, I get three history entries in my browser as your page loads. This means that if I have no interactions with the site and want to go back to HN, I need to click back three times.

While I get that this isn't a bug, it is a usability peeve that I notice on more and more sites lately.

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I sent a PR to fix this.

https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/p...

Got it and will integrate now - much appreciated and much better than the endless entries. Thank you.

Not everyone has your knowledge and ability

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not familiar with GitHub, please correct me if I'm wrong.

A pull request (PR) includes the changes needed to fix the issue - the OP used their knowledge and ability to help :)

You can see the actual file change here: https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/p...

Thank you. The parent to my comment originally had a snarky "and it only took me 45 seconds" to imply that instead of complaining the person he was replying to should have done what he did and opened a PR instead. Maybe I should reply using quotes so this sort of thing doesn't happen :)

Ahhhh! Yeah that makes sense, sorry for the assume! :)

Merged it in and looks like it's in place - hopefully fix that nasty issue. Many thanks for the fix.

It's not a new pattern though.

Before they've done it for telemetry and identifying which initiative this click is from. Nowadays it's just that they're redirecting the default route to a particular site after, so they could potentially switch the site they redirect to later.

While a small annoyance to mobile users which go there from sites like hn, it does give the owner of the site a tiny amount of control where ppl end up on their site.

At least that's my interpretation...

Still so annoying. I wish browsers at least might do something like skip quick redirects in history?

Browsers could pin recent other sites to the bottom of the visible history, so you can still leaf back within a website but moving back to the previous site is also very easy.

On desktop you can usually long-press the back button to get a list of the recent history and jump back two steps to avoid getting stuck.

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