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Comment by shazar | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated to the article, but hijacking the history and making it impossible to navigate back is the new cancer in the internet I guess.

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I seem to recall that hijacking the back button goes back to the 1990's. I suspect some of the ways in which it was done (like with naive redirects) probably don't work today, but the annoying effect has been there for eons.

I remember browsers stopped it for awhile. Maybe I’m misremembering?

I don't think you are. I think early versions of the problem happened because the website did a redirect: x.y.com/ would sand you to w.y.com/ and your browser would stupidly remember that as a user navigation. Your back button from w.y.com would take you to x.y.com, which would perpetrate the redirect. The fix for that is not to enter redirects into the back history, only user-initiated navigations.

This is still around

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API

Here’s the direct link to the video:

https://youtu.be/B2h5WwrkJFg

I enjoyed it immensely.

I thought people would find it really boring, hence the 800% speed up on most clips. Very glad to hear at least some people enjoyed it

Congrats, very well done! What was the laser doing the cutting and engraving?

I loved the video format, reminded me of the Primitive Technology channel where he just gets out of the way and lets the work itself (plus closed captions) do all the talking.

Just a no name, Chinese, 20W fiber laser. Takes a minute to get through but it works.

Would have liked to do a little more talking but the video already took way too bloody long and I didnt know if anyone would watch it

You should narrate the video, it would make it easier to follow for people who've no idea what you're doing (like me).

Did a few captions and would have liked to do more narration. Needed to get it done for an Instructables competition tho so just posted it as is

This is the opposite of boring :) Thank you and well done!

That's why I just middle click to open everything on a new tab nowadays. Back button still works 90% of the times, but when it's hijacked it's incredibly annoying, and I have plenty of monitor width for the tabs.

That's why I still prefer laptop to mobile or tablet: there is a middle click.

Longpress on iOS Safari gives you a menu that lets you open a link in the background, which is essentially open in a new tab. I use it all the time, e.g to work through the HN front page selecting some comment pages to read later

Ah!

I wish I could say thanks, but when I tried it out just now, I realised that I have seen it many times — trouble is, it's labelled in my mind as "that annoying popup I keep triggering by accident, how do I disable it?"

Still, have a metaphorical cookie: even though I don't like the thing, sharing knowledge kindly is always good :)

If nothing else, now you know what behavior was triggering the thing you don't like. Maybe now you can start to make it only happen deliberately, which might make it less annoying.

Too bad some modern sites even somehow block middle clicks.

Im on a mac cmd+click has always been reliable

Not sure I've seen this on the wild

A website cannot block the right click "open as new tab" action, and since that's what my gesture based interaction add-on uses, I'm safe.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gesturefy/

This is an abuse. And it’s one of obligations of web browsers to protect users from abuse.

Another dark pattern is hijacking back to move you to the 'front page' of the site. Like twitter, get linked to a tweet and then the back button takes you to your feed, which absolutely nobody requested.

I'm surprised to see this from Instructables (Autodesk). If you right-click the back button you'll see that it did four redirects and you can click the 5th to get back.

I highly doubt this is effective at anything.

Why do browsers even allow this behavior? The back button should automatically skip any blind redirects.

because Single-Page-Applications

they want the back button work with app internal state changes

Single page apps don't require a frontend router and the same can be achieved by unconditionally sending a redirect from the server side for any request as long as you also hook into the "beforeunload" event in the browser.

It's not the back button, but these two otherwise useful APIs used in a malicious way together:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/befo...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Location/hr...

Instructables went down the pan years ago when they tried to paywall the allsteps view.

Autodesk as a company are known for shitty behaviour, so it doesn't surprise me they made it worse.

It’s been common for ages and stupidly built single sign on sites have made it even worse.

The other thing I've seen is they scroll you to the bottom where those weird article embeds are.

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