Ask HN: Why is the back button becoming more and more useless? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is the back button becoming more and more useless?

22 pointslifeplusplus18 comments

I have noticed that more than usual now If I click back button I never get the same page again. Neither the content or scroll position is preserved. This is true on reddit, youtube, facebook, linkedin, and other sites. Each time just loading icon appears and then proceeded by completely random stuff. I.e. I'm scroll on reddit, I see few interesting things, I click one, it wasn't as good as I thought but the other thing I read was looking good, I go back, it's nowhere now.

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Because more and more things are being built as SPAs on frontend with JavaScript, because hammer nail dynamics just makes it easier to do that, and the back button is useful in a world where each page is a discrete HTTP request but now each page is the result of a dynamic JavaScript interpretation of state, and often people have not made any solution for showing the state represented by you hitting the back button which might be really difficult to do and also not help with any of the metrics business has assigned to show the site is functioning as it is supposed to.

In the case of Reddit, probably when you click interesting thing your current url is saved to history and then you go forward, you go back the url is used to construct page again, but that url probably represents a concept like "Currently most popular posts under subject X" not what lifeplusplus was just looking at with particular offset etc.

> Because more and more things are being built as SPAs on frontend with JavaScript

Regarding not making the back button do anything in certain cases, I think part of the problem is the shitty infinite-scroll, endless toilet-paper UX that many modern apps use for pagination. It makes a lot of UX choices awkward.

Say you're building some Instagram or Pinterest type of App and you just have some kind of endless scroll to view content continuously. The user scrolls for 10 minutes seeing 100 pages worth of content on one root URL, and then clicks on another page and then goes back. What then? Do you put them at the bottom of the 100 pages on the original page after they hit that back button?

It's not super difficult to save say the last item you scrolled to and go back there when you reload the page from a back button press, but that specific UX just makes it awkward to know where you even are within a specific page. Maybe if people get lost when going backwards and that's the UX choice, it's not even worth bothering.

Browsers could adapt and provide a unique attribute which they could scroll to again after reconstruction. But that would be sacrilegious and illegal in some countries.

isn't that bad UI? I see things, I click on one of them, so when I click "Go Back" I want to go back to where I started not to different dimension each time.

sure, it's bad UI and bad UX, but many bad UIs and bad UX exist because it would be prohibitively expensive to fix them, fixing them gives no benefit to the business that pays for them (have you stopped Reddit over this and gotten a message to them about it that they will understand?), or fixing them actually is actively against the interest of the business (when you use the back button on Reddit you get new showing of "most popular in this topic", their request count for "most popular in this topic" goes up, you are forced to scroll through bunch of stuff again increasing 'engagement' and everybody who makes decisions about how Reddit should work is happy)

Because the people building those websites are not using the History API to push website state changes correctly. [1]

You could easily use unique encodings of URLs to restore the deep state of the website's content. Even when you would use e.g. only the #hash like the old twitter app did.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History

"easily"

Is the Internet full of idiot engineers at LinkedIn etc?

I humbly submit it is not easy, these days, to deliver well-behaved SPAs.

I'm not implying those people are idiots. They just have different priorities, cause marketing and growth hacking keep them busy with other things.

100% agree, cookiengineer.

PMs have never cared about it in my 20+ years of experience.

> Is the Internet full of idiot engineers at LinkedIn etc?

Did you believe otherwise?

The cure to Impostor Syndrome is to realize that we're all impostors. Might as well get in on the action and put that Peter Principle to work.

Three emotions to manipulate; Fear of missing-out, Time-spent Anxiety, and Anger.

The evil marketing side of me says, bring up a dialog-box;

  "your time is important to us,

  would you like to view a 15-sec sponsor-commercial and return to your-position on the previous page Yes/No"

  'Yes' runs the Spot and returns to the exact position on the previous page.

  'No' either just removes the dialog-box, and/or takes you to the top of the current-page,

  or takes you to a random-page very loosely related to the subject of the previous page.

P.S. Please don't Kill ME!

Because of this, I've gotten into the habit of opening almost everything in a new tab. I browse the front page of HN/reddit in one tab, open comment pages in a new tab, and look at the submission itself in a new tab. In a way, I've mostly replaced the back button with the close tab-button on a lot of sites.

I know HN doesn't have this problem, but I still do it out of habit, and I then open multiple submissions of interes and go through them.

Yes, only a new tab can preserve the state of the old (referring) tab.

this.

Many devs don't bother to preserve back button functionality. There is a History API that helps, as does appropriate routing/linking in your app. But we are admittedly missing a strong culture of "Don't break the back button" in our industry.

Because pretty much everything nowadays is a bloated SPA with Javascript unnecessarily sprinkled on top to add "interactivity". The back button worked well when everything was a static page, but unfortunately now every site just has to make their own complicated twist on top of it to seem unique.

Not a direct answer, but I find that long pressing the back button is helpful in those situations, a dropdown appears and it shows all the previous pages I had visited, even if the history has been polluted.

Lazy devs who dont want to learn the history api and malicious devs who want to trap you on a website

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