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Comment by jholman | Hacker News Reader

Physically removing F5? Like going around to individual computers and modifying the keyboards?

Watching DOM events on the document and disabling key events for the key code 116. One can still trigger document refresh by remapping F5 to other physical key in OS settings, or by clicking refresh button in browser toolbar.

Does that work? I’m surprised browsers allow websites to disable the default behaviour of F5.

Yes absolutely. It's possible to remap the entire keyboard at the website level.

That seems unnecessarily complex compared to watching for a request to the same webpage, intercepting, and dropping the request. I believe that is all the refresh function is doing.

Now ofc I wouldn't give any executives that idea. Don't mess with expected user functionality, that's like UX 101. if I see my navigation tampered with, I flag that site as spam.

Depends on one's determination and motives there are many ways to "disable refresh". One motive I imagine and don't approve is some want their website to feel like a mobile app, for whatever reason.

I don't think you can drop a window refresh event in JS?

This was a webapp to be used internally in an enclosed system, so yes, modifying the keyboards. Company's own hardware.

If I understand correctly, they are talking about an in-house system where toy would be able to do exactly that

Yeah I don't understand either

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