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Comment by obituary_latte | Hacker News Reader

<off topic> I really can't stand it when websites like Wired usurp my back button. They even do it in a way where:

- Clicking back twice in rapid succession doesn't bring me back;

- Clicking and holding back button and selecting HN doesn't take me back;

which is a feat few other websites manage to pull off. I wonder if they had a team put together just for this purpose. Would have loved to be a fly on the wall in one of those meetings.

"How can we keep people on our site longer?"

"Sir, I know! Lets not let them leave!"

"Brilliant! Someone make this guy CEO stat!"

Utterly frustrating and inexcusable for a technology website.

</sorry>

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Keep in mind the old saw, don't ascribe to malice that which is explained by incompetence. Any site with a bunch of scripting buttons and "partner content" and AJAXy stuff laboriously glued on by legions of mediocre and outsourced developers over multiple years will find itself prone to screwing up the browser history accidentally. And when it happens, it's not anybody's job responsibility to fix it or even care about fixing it.

That said, yeah Wired may be doing it on purpose, but we don't know either way, unless someone uncovers some too-clever-to-be-a-mistake behavior in the code.

This pissed me off as much as you and I couldn't help, but take a few minutes and dig into the site a little. I found the following:

* This only affects me in Chrome (using the dev channel).

* Firefox Aurora (20.0a2) with noscript off doesn't have the back button 'hijack'.

* A quick debug in Chrome with F8 (stop script execution) and immediately pressing back shows there's a few 'hidden' functions being run -- not sure how to view those quite yet.

No back button issues here. I'm running Chromium Version 25.0.1323.1 on Ubuntu 12.10.

Oh man, you're much braver than I.

FWIW I'm on Chrome 24.0.1312.52 OSX.

I tried to take a gander but it's such a jumbled mess of affiliate/ad bs that I doubt even they'd be able to fix it.

What I've got a problem with is that they bind the "j"/"k" keys to navigate between articles. Which sucks if you're running Vimium/Vimperator and try to scroll. All of a sudden there will be a dozen links to the same article under your back button.

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