Comment by firefoxd
3 days ago
Ok, you can start with LinkedIn, I'll wait...
If you are wondering how it works. You get a link from LinkedIn, it's from an email or just a post someone shared. You click on it, the URL loads, and you read the post. When you click the back button, you aren't taken back to wherever you came from. Instead, your LinkedIn feed loads.
How did it happen? When you landed on the first link, the URL is replaced with the homepage first (location.replace(...) doesn't change the browser history). Then the browser history state is pushed to the original link. So it seems like you landed on the home page first then you clicked on a link. When you click the back button, you are taken back to the homepage where your feed entices you to stay longer on LinkedIn.
Also www.reddit.com is/was doing the same back button hijacking. From google.com visiting a post, then clicking back and you would find yourself on Reddit general feed instead of back to Google.
I'm pretty sure what you're describing is this long-standing bug[1] I've experienced only when using Mobile Safari on Reddit - affecting both old.reddit.com and the (horrible) modern Reddit. It just doesn't happen in other browsers/engines except on iOS. It's especially annoying on an iPad when I tend to use back/forward instead of open-in-new-tab-then-close on iPhone.
[1] At least, I hope it's a bug.
A bug that just coincidentally affects the only reddit visitors that are worth any money?
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For mobile Safari on iOS/iPad, the back button imo is just completely broken. It’s either a bug, or Apple might say I’m ‘holding it wrong’. One version it just stopped doing its one job correctly and it’s messing with my mental model of how I arrived at each tab. Currently:
Safari iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. The Back button should be grayed out and isn’t, and clicking it closes the tab. (???)
Chrome iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. Back button correctly grayed out as the tab has nowhere to go back to.
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News sites are doing it too. Displaying a full display ad when you try to leave
I would just like to point out that this was one of the things that the AMP straightjacket prevented. The whole online news industry has conclusively demonstrated that it can't be trusted with javascript and must be hospitalized, but they refuse to acknowledge their own illness.
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I wonder if Google will actually de rank them. Maybe a warning first for the big ones?
I do not see this behaviour on the latest version of Firefox. I do use old.reddit, however.
Old Reddit doesn't do this, it's the "new" one that pretends to be an app, that does it and host of other stupid/user-hostile shit.
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I don't use old Reddit, and haven't noticed this behaviour either.
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I usually find the back button just doesn't work on new Reddit at all.
Even on old.reddit, it breaks the back button. When you navigate back, it usually reloads the entire page you were on and ignores all your collapse actions on conversations.
IIRC Reddit is also doing the same thing on their mobile (Android) app.
Regarding Google and LinkedIn, I keep complaining to them about a stupid feature of Gmail. If I get an invitation from someone, Gmail puts "accept" as a button in the subject of the email - so if you aren't careful you can accept while you are scrolling through the subject lines. That is just the worst feature to put in their subject line.
I like Gmail asking me for no reason to stay on the page when I try to leave.
New spam policy for navigate-away blocking, hope that's Google's next article.
Does "accept" support "undo send"?
Actually, it looks like they fixed this problem. I just checked all the messages with the LinkedIn label and I don't see it popping that "hotspot" anymore. The only thing that pops up in the subject line is now "Unsubscribe", so that is really good.
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I don't think so. At least not from the inbox, where it happens. I'm not in the message - I'm just dragging on the subject lines to scroll, and these "hotspots" light up on the right portion of the subject.
> You get a link from LinkedIn [or such]. You click on it, the URL loads, and you read the post. When you click the back button, you aren't taken back to wherever you came from. Instead, […]
I've taken to opening anything in a new tab. Closing the tab is my new back button. In an idea world I shouldn't have to, of course, but we live in a world full of disks implementing dark patterns so not an ideal one. Opening in a new tab also helps me apply a “do I really care enough to give this reading time?” filter as my browsers are set to not give new tabs focus - if I've not actually looked at that tab after a little time it gets closed without me giving it any attention at all.
Specifically regarding LinkedIn and their family of dark patterns, I possibly should log in and update my status after the recent buy-out. I've not been there since updating my profile after the last change of corporate overlords ~9 years ago. Or I might just log in and close my profile entirely…
When I intentionally want to read something that is what I do. However once in a while I'm scrolling, selecting a window, or some other activity; and I happen to click on a link: instead of whatever action I intended I end up on a new page I didn't want to read (maybe I will want to read it, but I haven't go far enough cognitively to realize that). That is when I want my back button to work - a get out of here back to where I was.
Exactly, it has the potential to make you lose something important, forcing you to dig through browser history to find it again. If it happens to be a long-lived tab, you might be searching for a while if you forgot the name or site you were on.
given the level of hostility most businesses have towards their customers, we should probably be opening links in disposable virtual machines
Or just log all cookies and other localstorage against the domain of the top-level window.location which would achieve most of what a VM would with much lower overhead.
The only problem is that this would break some things like certain SSO systems, so you would have to implement a white-list to allow shared state, and the UX for that would be abused to nag users to whitelist everything. Most people would just click “OK” by default like they do with everything else, and those of us with more sense would have a new reason to be irritated by incessant nagging.
> Closing the tab is my new back button.
In Safari if you open a new tab, don't navigate anywhere, and click back, the tab closes and takes you back to the originating page. I've gottent so used to it, I now miss it in any other browser
>I've taken to opening anything in a new tab.
this is the way.
I have always done this, although mostly so I don’t have to reload the page I am coming from when I hit the back button.
Many years ago I was 'converted' to browse like that, one of the reasons was just that - to prevent back-button fatfinger.
Here's the setup I use:
[1] install this userscript, keep the default `include` i.e. 'every link": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763404
This too. Particularly required for broken SPA-style sites that reset when you re-enter instead of properly maintaining their state, or infinite scroll based pages that don't remember where you scrolled to/through.
This is the way. People think I am eccentric for the number of tabs I keep open.
I am eccentric, née properly insane, which is part of why I have so many tabs left open over my various devices. Sometimes a browser crash that loses some or all that context is a benefit!
I do that everywhere, but it seems to fail for LinkedIn: they don’t redirect the link if it’s not in the same tab.
Bad design on their part, another reason not to revisit! If a site breaks my workflow I generally stop using the site, rather than changing my workflow.
Though I'm guessing it would work in the cases being discussed in this article & thread: when you are navigating into a site (such as linkedin) from another, rather than following internal links.
Facebook does this as well.
Thanks for explaining how they do it BTW! I didn't really think about it. I just knew it was shitty.
LinkedIn is malware and it's frankly embarrassing that we seem to be stuck with it. It's like a mechanic being stuck with a wrench that doesn't just punch you in the face while using it, it opens your toolbox just to come out and punch you randomly.
You know what's funny, just the other day I tried to do an "export" of my data from my account.
The option I chose was "profile data" because I wanted to get my whole work history/projects/etc. for a new resume.
The export took several hours.
When I finally downloaded it, it included my name, Email, short description, and my Email address...
What do you mean "stuck with it"? I just don't use LinkedIn. Do you need it for job hunting for example?
> Do you need it for job hunting for example?
God I hope you are being funny. Why else would anyone install this crap?
The amount of times I saw a "LinkedIn profile URL" as a required field on job applications outside of LinkedIn is concerning, to say the least.
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LinkedIn won't bother - they don't rely on SEO
Would this actually fall afoul of their new policy, though?
Assume the way that universal links work, is that the site main page is loaded, and some hash is supplied, indicating the page to navigate to from there. That's annoying, but perfectly valid, and may be necessary for sites that establish some kind of context baseline from their landing page.
It's not valid. You went to a page. They said "no, you're actually on the feed," and then immediately navigate you to the page you'd actually intended to visit. This is that they're doing today, and it's terrible. If I go to a URL, I'm NOT going to your homepage feed. I never wanted to go there.
Well, a lot of content, these days, is really data presented in a “window.” You don’t have the old HTML address, anymore.
It’s like reading an eBook in a reader. You always use the reader to interpret, format, and present the data.
It kind of sticks a spike into the old “each page is a document” model.
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and then if you click the back button again it just reloads the page, trapped in a vicious loop!
Can we reach out directly to Reid Hoffman? Or is he too wrapped up doing damage control from being all over the Epstein Files?
[dead]
The fix is to hold down the back button so the local history shows up, and pick the right page to go back to. Unfortunately, some versions of Chrome and/or Android seem to break this but that's a completely self-inflicted problem.
That's not a fix. It's a workaround.
It's a fix because it completely solves the issue on any site, without requiring changes from LinkedIn or any other actor.
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The fix is to not to implement anti-user patterns. What you're describing is a loophole around it.
> The fix is to not to implement anti-user patterns.
That's not a fix the user can implement themselves. Holding down the back button is comparatively trivial.
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The problem is, there are two conceptions of the back button, and the browser only implements one.
One conception is "take me back to the previous screen I was on", one is "take me one level up the hierarchy." They're often but not always the same.
Mac Finder is a perfect example of a program correctly implementing the two. If you're deep in some folder and then press cmd+win+l to go to ~/Downloads, cmd+up will get you to ~/, but cmd+[ will get you back to where you were before, even if this was deep in some network drive, nowhere near ~.
I feel like mobile OSes lean towards "one level up" as the default behavior, while traditional desktop OSes lean more towards tracking your exact path and letting you go back.
Desktop had this solved, on Windows there was and remains a distinction between "back" (history) and "up" (navigation).
Browsers actually used to have hierarchical navigation support, with buttons and all, back in the age of dinosaurs - all one had to do is to set up some meta tags in HTML head section to tell which URL is "prev"/"next"/"up". Alas, this has proven too difficult for web developers, who eventually even forgot web was meant for documents at all, and at some point browsers just hid/removed those buttons since no one was using them anyway.
The "Back" remains, and as 'Arainach wrote, it's only one concept and it's not, and never has been "up one level in the hierarchy".
EDIT:
The accepted/expected standard way for "take me up one level in hierarchy" on the web is for the page itself to display the hierarchy e.g. as breadcrumbs. The standard way to go to top level of the page is through a clickable logo of the page/brand. Neither of those need, or should, involve changing behavior of browser controls.
> The problem is, there are two conceptions of the back button, and the browser only implements one.
In web browsers, there is only one concept.
There is no concept of "up one level in the heirarchy". If you want that make your own button in your website.
> There is no concept of "up one level in the heirarchy". If you want that make your own button in your website.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-move-up-one-url-level-in-chrom... *shrug*
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Agreed. I remember addons from the XUL Firefox era that did this.
I miss that feature. And that era.
> one is "take me one level up the hierarchy." They're often but not always the same.
Who expects this behavior? It doesn't make sense. You just want to go back where you were. Most file browsers I've used wanting to implement going up a level in hierarchy, have an arrow pointing up.
GNU Info and many Web 1.0 navigation schemes involved a hierarchy which did involve "Next", "Previous", "Up", and "Home" type dimensions.
For example, the Bacula documentation is still online, as a prime example of this: https://www.bacula.org/9.6.x-manuals/en/main/Getting_Started...
Nobody
If you reached point B from point A - and you tell someone "I would like to go back", then you are expecting to go back to A. Not some intermediate, arbitrarily chosen point C.
You're describing 2 different concepts, back and up, not 2 backs
Exactly. It is crazy that they described MacOS finder as doing this correctly when finder has no concept of up, it only has a back.
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