Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bognar | Hacker News Reader

I hate that Google Docs modifies your history when you go to the next slide. This presentation clocks in at 57 slides and Firefox history defaults to truncating after 50 entries, meaning I can only go back to slide 7 and not back to HN.

Is it really better that I can use my browser forward and back buttons to navigate slides? Especially when there are forward/back buttons on the presentation anyway?

View on HN

I personally enjoy this aspect, as I think it fits the philosophy of the web better. Each slide has an address, because they're separate things. You can also trivially link to a particular slide this way.

I open articles in new tabs, so the going back to HN part hasn't ever affected me.

Each slide should have an address yes but I don't think everything should push do your history stack.

That Git cheat sheet page the was on HN a few days ago. Every time you changed the command it pushed onto your history. I want to click back to HN not back and forth between 2 commands I switched across 6 times.

I was going to comment then but I don't think the site was using push state it is actually browser behaviour.

I just open all articles (and all HN comment threads) in new tabs. Sometimes I don't even get to them after scanning the front-page for awhile.

It would be nice if the history UI wasn't purely linear, but that it remembered the last x pages on the current domain and the last x pages on the previous n domains.

SnapBack in Safari used to be really handy for these sorts of pages, however I think that feature is gone now. From what I recall it would take you back to either the last typed URL, bookmarked URL or search results page.

i agree, i find that history modification on slide changes is a huge anti-pattern. aggravates me every single time.

i think a good compromise is to use the left/right keys for onpage slide nav, but leave the browser history alone.

This is why I never open links in same window, everything is middle click. Even on ios I will tap-hold to open in new window, I can never trust JS apps not to trash my forward/back

Not a problem in Chrome: http://i.imgur.com/EfjOolZ.png

Try reading to the end of the article...

http://i.imgur.com/8nSjOu1.png

(exact same behavior in Firefox and IE too)

Hm... true. This is strange, since I remember Chrome preserving an item from a different domain in the history popup.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com