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Comment by ungruntled | Hacker News Reader

Any site that hijacks the back button to show you ads is similar to a creep locking you briefly in a room so you ‘consider’ their offer.

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I don't understand all those mentions of websites hijacking back buttons. I've been able to use it in both my main browser, Firefox with Ublock origin, and Vanilla MS Edge.

It tends to be a bigger issue on mobile, where very few people block ads.

It’s been horrendous on mobile lately. Sometimes it’ll still hijack my back button on desktop with ublock and privacy badger.

I wonder why. Firefox Mobile has uBlock Origin too. Can't believe people can bear to open a browser without it. If it didn't have uBlock, I would save the web browsing mostly for the desktop.

I thought this only applies to Android?

I think Firefox on iOS uses webkit and doesn’t support addons. There is firefox focus which does block ads but also only supports one tab at a time.

You can do it on iOS:

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/enable-content-blockers-saf...

Focus can act as an ad blocker for Safari too, IIRC.

IIRC because I think that's what I did before I had a PiHole doing most of that, but I can't remember for sure.

Which is surprising because mobile is especially unusable without ad blocking.

I use an iPhone 6s for mobile. It blocks ads in Safari fine, but when I'm browsing Reddit via Narwhal, stuff opens in a webview and the webview doesn't have ad blocking. So the ads make the phone literally unusable for 5 ~ 30 seconds while they load up auto-playing videos, interstitial parallax image ads, etc

As if three popups wasn't enough to make users not want to visit the site every again ...

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