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Comment by jefozabuss | Hacker News Reader

I still have some ptsd from payment gateway integrations via iframes about 6-7 years ago. If you thought SPAs are bad by themselves for history tracking imagine those banking iframes randomly adding more entries via inside navigation/redirection that you have to track manually.

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A lot can be said for just putting a "back" button a page. I still do it occasionally for this very reason. Then again, my user base for the apps I write are the most non-technical folks imaginable, so many of them have no concept of a browser back button to begin with. I am not being hyperbolic either.

Thing is, the browser back button is still there, though. So now you have two identical buttons that do different things. And that's really bad UX.

I’m split on this. I used to agree with you but when I talked to internal users and customers, they really liked having a back button in the app. I would tell them the browser back button is there and we haven’t broken history so it should work to which they just often shrug and say they “just” prefer it.

My hypothesis is that they’ve had to deal with so many random web apps breaking the back button so that behaviour is no longer intuitive for them. So I don’t push back against in-app back buttons any more.

It's okay if both buttons do the same thing. But OP (if I understood them correctly) proposed the in-app Back button as a hacky solution to the problem of browser one being broken, which kinda implies that they don't behave the same.

I think you're right on the money—those bad web apps that told people emphatically "do NOT use your browser's back button!" did the rest of us a lot of damage, as I really do agree that it trained many people to never press it unless they actually want to leave the app they're using.

I myself am guilty of (about 14 years ago now) giving an SPA a "reload" button, which had it go and fetch clean copies of the current view from the server. It was a social app; new comments and likes would automatically load in for the posts already visible, but NEW posts would NOT be loaded in, as they would cause too much content shift if they were to load in automatically.

Admittedly this is not a great solution, and looking back on it now, I can think of like 10 different better ways to solve that issue… but perhaps some users of that site are seeing my comment here, so yeah, guilt admitted haha.

Bad UX that provides a functionality that otherwise isn't there at all is still better.

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