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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

The USGS's viewer is kind of odd in that unlike every other online map in existence, double clicking does not zoom in. It also overlays all of the maps with a weird color tint (which you can fix by turning off "Turn map boundaries on or off" in Settings). Both viewers annoyingly fill your browser history every time you move around or change zoom levels.

[Edited to remove snark]

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Maybe let the USGS folks know? If they're anything like any other department, they have one person whose job it is to work on every single website, and they're not well-researched web developers, they're a jack of all trade who had to learn just enough tricks on a page by page basis to keep things from falling apart, with a mandate to leave things alone until they break.

Also, if USGS doesn't have the resources to improve this, propose they post it as a challenge for public solutioning: https://www.challenge.gov/

Sometimes, an agency is in need of a willing helping hand.

> Both viewers annoyingly fill your browser history every time you move around or change zoom levels

To be fair that's not limited to map viewers. A lot of web apps do that. I think finding the right balance is a bit of an art.

> Both viewers annoyingly fill your browser history every time you move around or change zoom levels.

So a lot of us that actually use this stuff love that we can copy that URL at any particular moment. Is there a way to do that and not show up in browser history?

> So a lot of us that actually use this stuff love that we can copy that URL at any particular moment. Is there a way to do that and not show up in browser history?

Yes, there is a specific browser API you can use to do that, or an older technique of using the fragment part of the URL for that kind of data.

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