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Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

The site breaks the back button in Firefox.

Maybe a silly question but: is this by accident or a dark pattern? I hate it when this happens in the wild, but I never know if I should be suspicious of a dark patter or not.

This looks like an accident. Even many of the suspicious sites that do it seem to be an accidental side effect. The ones that annoy me the most are the news articles that trigger a history event on scroll. I think they do it as part of a tracking mechanism to detect scroll position, but the result is you have to press back twice to leave. I can't see the benefit, not like anyone is going to press back then say, "oh i guess i can't leave so I'll click an ad".

The site wealthygorilla[.]com alters your history by erasing the current contents and replacing it with more of their articles. It irritated more way more then it should've the one time I went to their site. I went through and found the JS where they implemented that "feature".

It was totally an accident, the embedded app demo was interfering with the browser router. I fixed it now!

Safari on ios too. I assume it is a bug because it would be a very counterproductive feature to use when presenting a project. As others have said: good idea, but with no release the risk of forgetting about it is high. I have starred many github projects but only gone back to see progress on few of them.

This comment breaks HN guidelines:

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

IMO this guideline needs to be removed. Knowing that a site is going to break the back button is important.

There needs to be a guideline about <please don’t link to the guidelines whenever someone does something helpful>

Chrome on Android as well

won't fix the bug but right click on the back arrow to get a historical list of where you've been in the current tab and go back from there

huh... and here I am, always long-clicking the back button for the back button history.

Long left-clicking has the advantage of saving one click when you immediately drag your mouse down to the page you want to go back to.

I am wondering, is there a userscript or something to prevernt sites from doing this?

Same with Brave on Android, after tapping anywhere

Related, was it difficult to just write this static page in plain HTML/CSS? They come with not breaking stuff and the web by default.

We really need to unbreak the present before unlocking the future, or the future will still be broken.

The back button doesn’t work in iOS Safari too

Chrome on Linux too

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