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Comment by rzzzt | Hacker News Reader

I'm seeing this kind of complaint so frequently, it made me wonder if there is a software solution for it. Can we build a better back button?

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There's a local non-technical solution in the site 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.

I'm interested in whether a technical solution exists for the problem -- just so one could point to the Gobblesmack Browser or the RealBack extension in Chrome store (names obviously made up) whenever this comes up. That would cut down on the complaints as well.

Right clicking on the back button and left clicking on the 'flag' link on the complaints covers both reasonably well, if imperfectly.

Hold the back button down until you get a list, then choose.

Can the browser do this for me once it sees that a single button press sent me back to where I started? In AudioOne's case, it's /frontpage -> / -> /frontpage

Build back better ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngF2cpoxkQw

It seems to work just fine in Firefox (on android, bit I would assume that doesn't matter). I see the pre-redirect page in the list when I hold back, but a single tap of back brings be back to HN.

I would imagine that it sees the `history.pushState()` or w/e without any interaction and knows that it's a dead state/page/(?).

> Can we build a better back button?

Yes, don't break it to begin with.

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