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Comment by slowmotiony | Hacker News Reader

"Sites which allow you to use the back button are disappearing from the world"

Friendly reminder:

“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.”

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

Being too common now is interesting when it didn't used to be.

The example was included in the guidelines for a reason.

And in any case it’s not at all relevant to an article about color scales.

That's a bullshit guideline. Back button breakage is a crime against usability and we should be as vocal and irritating as possible about it -- especially in a forum that regularly results in changes along the "Why did (insert FAANG) lock my account with no explanation?" front.

Again, this guideline is garbage. Rage against it. Rage against back button breakage.

There should be a guideline against citing the guidelines. I'm guilty of it too, but it's a boring and shitty (and off-topic! it's metadiscussion!) thing to do.

I think this is a worthy cause and something that interests me. But it should have its own place, and not be brought up randomly on some other topic. Perhaps you or someone else could write a post on it and submit it! That would lead to better engagement and a more focused discussion. It would also be in tune with the guidelines- come to think of it, that's probably why the guidelines are as they are.

I appreciate the juicy center of good humor in your comment of rage. Maybe the following will help.

You're right, of course. It's just that there are competing values, so we have to make a tradeoff. One value is usability and having web content be less annoying, intrusive, abusive, and so on. No disagreement there. I think most HN readers share similar feelings about these things; certainly I do.

The other value is curiosity. Curiosity likes new things, different things [0], unexpected things—things it can learn from. It doesn't do so well with repetition [1], indignation, or genericness [2].

These two values conflict because complaints about the former tend to be repetitive, indignant, and generic.

How to decide the conflict? That question actually has a clear answer, because we're trying to optimize for just one thing here, namely intellectual curiosity [3]. So that value has to win.

This is one of those cases where it's super helpful to have just one thing you're optimizing for and to know exactly what it is. It's not that this is the 'right' decision, the 'correct' guideline, or anything like that—it's just correct relative to what we're trying to optimize for.

[0] Diffs are what's interesting https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Thanks for writing that up and taking the time to explain the "optimizing". The moderation approach makes a lot more sense when you consider it as a hill-climbing heuristic along that one particular axis.

> complaints about the former tend to be repetitive, indignant, and generic.

Rest assured that I'll do my best to avoid these in any future complaints about back button breakage!

Send me a link if you come up with a new one ;)

Yes, exactly - it's hill-climbing. Sisyphean optimization, you might call it.

complaining about breaking the guidelines is too common to be interesting. let's add that one in there too.

Feel free to send an e-mail to the moderators and suggest it.

I got so used to opening in the new tab that I don't even notice this anymore. Infuriatingly, some sites disregard ctrl+click and either still open links in the same tab or both in the same and in the new tab!

If there's a Firefox plugin to fix that behavior, I'd love to know!

It doesn’t help that some web frameworks make it difficult to preserve the open in new tab behaviour

What modern (last 10 years) web framework makes it difficult to have links be links?

NextJS complains if you don’t use their Link component, which in turn doesn’t allow open in new tab unless you nest a dummy <a> inside it. Because I think the Link uses onclick then if there is an immediate <a> child will set it up.

The <Link/> component is used for client-side page navigations in the same application. If you need to open links in a new tab with `target=“_blank”`, you should use the normal <a/> tag.

Yeah the one thing I love to do, because hey it is the web, is open navigations in a new tab. For example when banking see my transactions in one tab while making a payment in the second. I hate sites that break that. Banks like to do that presumably for security theatre. NextJS makes it easy to mess up but once you know the trick it is ok - they should probably add a console warning for it.

That's not what the parents are complaining about. It's when the user wants to open a regular link in a new tab using a key modifier.

This is working for me (just tested). Can you share one that isn’t please? I can investigate.

Hey Lee. I'm not saying it doesn't work :)

I'm just saying they are talking about something else.

I just realized you work for Vercel, so how about I try to minimum reproduce then I can raise an Github issue?

That would be very helpful, thank you!

I have put a link to the issue in my HN profile. I think me providing the code will clear up the confusion as to what I think is a problem as we might all be talking about something different.

It has been fixed in the canary version already. Nice.

https://github.com/vercel/next.js/pull/36436

I got into this habit long before I got into tech, I wasn't even conscious of the reason why. You're right, it's extremely frustrating when a website breaks middle-click to open in new tab behavior.

that's why I have thousands of tabs open

Double click or double tap!

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