7 ms·

Browser History (2013)

109 points by mattkahl 10y ago

rosstex 10y ago
On the desktop, I like having the option to see what a page just looked like, without reloading any data. If I hit the back button, it's usually because something on the previous page caught my attention and I want to find it again. If I want to reload a page, I'll refresh or click on the site logo (in the case of getting to the root of the site).
- fredleblanc 10y ago
  I hate when I go back and things change. I went back for a reason! But I'm also of the school that wants View Source to view the source that was just downloaded, not re-download a new copy of the source.
  - cmg 10y ago
    I've never understood why View Source would do anything but show me the source of the page I'm looking at - not the source of the page as it is "now," which could be seconds, minutes or hours later. If I'm looking at a page, the browser has or could have a copy of the original stream sent from the server, why not just display that?
    - userbinator 10y ago
      What browser(s) are you using that have such behaviour? Is this a new "feature" in the very latest versions? I don't think I've ever seen View Source make another request on Chrome, Firefox, IE, or Opera.
      - cmg 10y ago
        Chrome does. "Yes, when you "view source", you're really opening a new tab that opens the page again and displays the source rather than renders the page." https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=4650#c2 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=4650#c...
  - aethertron 10y ago
    Agreed. I'm even irked when I go back and the ads change.
- jobigoud 10y ago
  I want my history to be like my personal slice of Archive.org.
wtbob 10y ago
I don't get what he doesn't understand: when the user goes back, the browser is supposed to show the document he saw when he left, as it was when he left it (so long as that view hasn't expired out of the browser's cache completely). This is intuitively what a user expects, right? > Note: if history list mechanisms unnecessarily prevent users from viewing stale resources, this will tend to force service authors to avoid using HTTP expiration controls and cache controls when they would otherwise like to. Service authors may consider it portant that users not be presented with error messages or warning messages when they use navigation controls (such as BACK) to view previously fetched resources. Even though sometimes such resources ought not to cached, or ought to expire quickly, user interface considerations may force service authors to resort to other means of preventing caching (e.g. “once-only” URLs) in order not to suffer the effects of improperly functioning history mechanisms. I don't get what he fails to understand: if the back function obeyed expiration headers, then going back could potentially reload the page, potentially causing a re-GET or even a re-POST.
- taneq 10y ago
  > I don't get what he fails to understand: if the back function obeyed expiration headers, then going back could potentially reload the page, potentially causing a re-GET or even a re-POST. There's already behaviour in place in most (all?) browsers to cover this case, at least for POST. When you go back to a page with had form data attached to the request, they'll ask you whether to re-submit the form. This doesn't happen for GET, but then you probably shouldn't be using GET for data anyway.
  - wtbob 10y ago
    Honestly, they shouldn't re-prompt IMHO — they should only do that on a reload — rather, they should just display the page as it was, which is what I expect when I hit back.
    - paavokoya 10y ago
      I agree. This would greatly frustrate users on quick-feed news sites and social media who are hoping to find that article or post they were just reading to find it now gone because the sites algorithm marked it as 'read'.
panic 10y ago
You can use the pageshow event to detect when the browser navigates back in history to a page in the back/forward cache: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/pageshow https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/pageshow More generally, you shouldn't make a "single-page app" unless you really need to. The web is designed for navigating between multiple documents. Browser features like history and bookmarks will work better if you stick to the standard behavior.
zhoujianfu 10y ago
The way I've always wished the back button worked is as though I had just opened a new tab (instead of clicking a link/submitting a form), and now I've just closed that tab and once again see the original tab I'd left. I assume this is actually a big reason people use (so many) tabs... the back button doesn't work right! Sigh!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- KJP191 10y ago
  It used to work like that in an old version of Opera back in the day (perhaps Opera 5.0? I think it was the same version that introduced gestures),but a bunch of sites saw it as insecure and blocked Opera users from their sites so they backed down and switched to the standard method.
- swiley 10y ago
  This is how mothra on plan9 works. It's really an underrated browser, it has no tabs because it doesn't need them.
- blowski 10y ago
  When you open a new tab, the original tab continues to run in the background, but you can't do that for your history. Imagine a page which shows a number that increments every second the page is loaded. When you open a new tab, it continues to increment. When you go back, should it continue from where you left it, or behave as if it was loaded the whole time? The answer will be different for different sites, and the browser's default behaviour will sometimes be wrong.
eridius 10y ago
This article no longer reflects the behavior of Safari at least as of version 10 (the version that ships with macOS Sierra). In my tests, the second version of the page that attempts to bust the bfcache behaves identically to the first version, i.e. the bfcache is not in fact busted.
spotman 10y ago
> Today, the only option for ensuring an XHR request is made when the user re-visits a page via the back button is to (1) add an unload handler then (2) use cache busting. I'm sure there is exceptions, but in general, the last thing I want my browser to do when i press back, is to start making requests. I expect the requests to have been already made.
- jacquesc 10y ago
  The result of this thinking is when I press the back button, I have to refresh the page manually because the data is stale. My daily use case for this is Github Issues. Simple repro: Click an issue, make a change, press back. Now the list view is out of date and doesn't show my changes. So I have to refresh. I think a background XHR request is the best approach (until browsers fix this issue for real). On page load: pull latest from server (if network is down, then no-op). If no changes, then don't change. If there are changes then replace inline without a new page reload.
  - daurnimator 10y ago
    No! If I click back I want to see what I saw last time. e.g. I might have seen 3 news articles I was interested in, I click though and read the first one. When I click back I want to see the exact same list as before, and be able to read the next article I saw; not new articles that have been written while I was reading the last one. You can s/news article/github issue/ and my response is the same.
  - userbinator 10y ago
    Perhaps the Back button should really be split into Back (cached) and Back (reload), since both of those are equally valid use cases. (Edit: the fact that the parent comment and another sibling comment here currently completely disagree is evidence enough that both options are necessary. I personally want both behaviours, depending on the situation.) No doubt the "UX experts" will complain that it's too complicated for "average users", but we aren't and don't want to be "average users" --- we want a powerful browser UI that lets us control our browsing experience better; that's something that seems to be rare in this age of increasingly dumbed-down UIs.
gayprogrammer 10y ago
This isn't an all-or-nothing issue. The author generalizes that developers and users today use browsers/html differently than they did before, but what I'm hearing is actually a new way to use the word/button for "(go) back". The back button has not changed functionality--it still works as expected on all non-webapp webpages. From my perspective, I think the author should be asking for browsers to implement a new button that follows his desired "load previous URL" behavior.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jimjimjim 10y ago
I generally want a back button that rewinds time (server side be damned). usually I'll right-mouse-button click + open in new tab on any link instead of just clicking on it. Eventually, like garbage collection, I'll stop, go back to the start of the tabs and close a bunch of them, then go back to what i was looking at. And if I'm on a site that doesn't allow right clicking on a link? well the site had better be important otherwise it's gonna get closed.
- daurnimator 10y ago
  Use middle click (or for those without a middle mouse button on a computer they can't reconfigure, use ctrl/cmd + click)
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Sometimes middle click gets swallowed by bad code. But more importantly, you can't use either method if the link is a javascript function.
- aethertron 10y ago
  > I generally want a back button that rewinds time Me too. But not for the browser. For the OS.
jlarocco 10y ago
It's hard to take this seriously because the page itself does not work correctly w.r.t. the back button. For example, if I click through to the http 1.1 spec in the first paragraph, then hit "Back" I see the scrollbar shrink as new content is loaded and uBlock's block count increases as new content loads. If I scroll to the bottom of the page, click a link, and then click back, I don't even go back to the same spot - I'm at the end of the article and content loads below it... My expectation as a user, regardless of the spec, is that I should see exactly what I saw when I was just on the page. Render to a bitmap, and when I click "back" display the bitmap. If going back to the page requires any network requests then the page is doing it wrong. The exception that proves the rule would be streaming content.
ashitlerferad 10y ago
[2013]
Manishearth 10y ago
Note that the behavior described in the post is per spec -- the cache spec is a red herring and doesn't apply here. The web specs override the HTTP spec in various spaces. The relevant spec is at https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/browsers.html#the-session-history-of-browsing-contexts https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/browsers.html#the-ses... Note: > An entry with persisted user state is one that also has user-agent defined state. This specification does not specify what kind of state can be stored. > User agents may discard the Document objects of entries other than the current entry that are not referenced from any script, reloading the pages afresh when the user or script navigates back to such pages. This specification does not specify when user agents should discard Document objects and when they should cache them. and from https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/browsers.html#traverse-the-history https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/browsers.html#travers... > If entry no longer holds a Document object, then navigate the browsing context to entry's URL and > If entry has a different Document object than the current entry, > ... > Make entry's Document object the active document ------ Browsers try to treat the back button as if the user had never left the page. So the XHR requests aren't re-made because the page simply isn't reloaded, it's just made active. The fact that Chrome says "from cache" might be a bug here, but what the devtools show isn't visible to JS/etc, so this isn't a compatibility issue. AFAICT Chrome and Firefox (and presumably Safari) behave the same here, except from a difference in how the bfcache is invalidated. (chrome seems to invalidate when the domain changes). I'm not clear why all of this is a problem though. If the page is reloaded, it's reloaded. If it's loaded from the bfcache, it's as if it was never unloaded (almost the same as the user switching a tab and coming back, except of course JS was suspended). Both behaviors seem ... fine for a webapp?
mixonic 10y ago
Author here, happy this popped up and to see the HN community thinking through it. A few people have brushed off what I sketched as uninteresting and don't see any issues. I'll try to explain it another way (with three years reflection to help). Single page applications are now quite popular. Most single page apps use a different definition of "back" than browsers do, and there are times when the two treatments conflict. Many, or most, use a local in-memory database to keep track of information without going to the server. They update that in-memory store as you make changes. For example you see a list of names: Mary, Robert, John. You click Robert and edit the name to "Rob", the name auto-saves. Then you click "back". Because single-page apps control "back" when in the SPA, they do what most developers want. They return to a semantically correct page, showing Mary, Rob (just edited), John. Tons of apps do this. This is not what the browser does. The browser, if following the "back" specs, would show the out-of-date names of Mary, Robert, and John. The theoretical conflict can also become practical. Think through this flow: * Visit /names * AJAX for GET /api/names * See Mary, Robert, John * Edit Robert's name to Bob, autosave * AJAX for POST /api/name/4 with the new name Bob * See Mary, Bob, John * Click on a link, lets say to Mary's website URL * Mary's website, new domain, loads. * ...click back The SPA loads up, and attempts to GET /api/names. However, the bfcache is at play since the native "back" behavior is running. So the stale API response, with the original names Mary, Robert, John is returned. The list of names on the screen is DIFFERENT than what the user saw after they edited. Additionally most SPA apps presume AJAX calls return accurate data, however here the names are not the names currently in the database. They are only in the bfcache. You can imagine, with more complex data, ways this can cause complex and unforeseen failures. This is a very poorly understood corner of JavaScript development even today. [edit]: formatting
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  What you describe does not sound like bfcache behavior. Bfcache should make it like you never clicked the link, and create no requests. Did you test this? Is something broken? Separately, do browsers currently return expired data to AJAX calls? Which ones?
  - mixonic 10y ago
rob74 10y ago
bendmebackmeanywayyouwantme? That rang a bell... but according to http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/garbage/ithinkimparanoid.html http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/garbage/ithinkimparanoid.html it should actually be bendmebreakmeanywayyouneedme ;)

109 points by mattkahl 10y ago

On the desktop, I like having the option to see what a page just looked like, without reloading any data. If I hit the back button, it's usually because something on the previous page caught my attention and I want to find it again. If I want to reload a page, I'll refresh or click on the site logo (in the case of getting to the root of the site).

fredleblanc 10y ago
I hate when I go back and things change. I went back for a reason! But I'm also of the school that wants View Source to view the source that was just downloaded, not re-download a new copy of the source.
- cmg 10y ago
  I've never understood why View Source would do anything but show me the source of the page I'm looking at - not the source of the page as it is "now," which could be seconds, minutes or hours later. If I'm looking at a page, the browser has or could have a copy of the original stream sent from the server, why not just display that?
  - userbinator 10y ago
    What browser(s) are you using that have such behaviour? Is this a new "feature" in the very latest versions? I don't think I've ever seen View Source make another request on Chrome, Firefox, IE, or Opera.
    - cmg 10y ago
      Chrome does. "Yes, when you "view source", you're really opening a new tab that opens the page again and displays the source rather than renders the page." https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=4650#c2 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=4650#c...
- aethertron 10y ago
  Agreed. I'm even irked when I go back and the ads change.
jobigoud 10y ago
I want my history to be like my personal slice of Archive.org.

wtbob 10y ago

I don't get what he doesn't understand: when the user goes back, the browser is supposed to show the document he saw when he left, as it was when he left it (so long as that view hasn't expired out of the browser's cache completely). This is intuitively what a user expects, right? > Note: if history list mechanisms unnecessarily prevent users from viewing stale resources, this will tend to force service authors to avoid using HTTP expiration controls and cache controls when they would otherwise like to. Service authors may consider it portant that users not be presented with error messages or warning messages when they use navigation controls (such as BACK) to view previously fetched resources. Even though sometimes such resources ought not to cached, or ought to expire quickly, user interface considerations may force service authors to resort to other means of preventing caching (e.g. “once-only” URLs) in order not to suffer the effects of improperly functioning history mechanisms. I don't get what he fails to understand: if the back function obeyed expiration headers, then going back could potentially reload the page, potentially causing a re-GET or even a re-POST.

taneq 10y ago
> I don't get what he fails to understand: if the back function obeyed expiration headers, then going back could potentially reload the page, potentially causing a re-GET or even a re-POST. There's already behaviour in place in most (all?) browsers to cover this case, at least for POST. When you go back to a page with had form data attached to the request, they'll ask you whether to re-submit the form. This doesn't happen for GET, but then you probably shouldn't be using GET for data anyway.
- wtbob 10y ago
  Honestly, they shouldn't re-prompt IMHO — they should only do that on a reload — rather, they should just display the page as it was, which is what I expect when I hit back.
  - paavokoya 10y ago
    I agree. This would greatly frustrate users on quick-feed news sites and social media who are hoping to find that article or post they were just reading to find it now gone because the sites algorithm marked it as 'read'.

panic 10y ago

You can use the pageshow event to detect when the browser navigates back in history to a page in the back/forward cache: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/pageshow https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/pageshow More generally, you shouldn't make a "single-page app" unless you really need to. The web is designed for navigating between multiple documents. Browser features like history and bookmarks will work better if you stick to the standard behavior.

zhoujianfu 10y ago

The way I've always wished the back button worked is as though I had just opened a new tab (instead of clicking a link/submitting a form), and now I've just closed that tab and once again see the original tab I'd left. I assume this is actually a big reason people use (so many) tabs... the back button doesn't work right! Sigh!

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
KJP191 10y ago
It used to work like that in an old version of Opera back in the day (perhaps Opera 5.0? I think it was the same version that introduced gestures),but a bunch of sites saw it as insecure and blocked Opera users from their sites so they backed down and switched to the standard method.
swiley 10y ago
This is how mothra on plan9 works. It's really an underrated browser, it has no tabs because it doesn't need them.
blowski 10y ago
When you open a new tab, the original tab continues to run in the background, but you can't do that for your history. Imagine a page which shows a number that increments every second the page is loaded. When you open a new tab, it continues to increment. When you go back, should it continue from where you left it, or behave as if it was loaded the whole time? The answer will be different for different sites, and the browser's default behaviour will sometimes be wrong.

eridius 10y ago

This article no longer reflects the behavior of Safari at least as of version 10 (the version that ships with macOS Sierra). In my tests, the second version of the page that attempts to bust the bfcache behaves identically to the first version, i.e. the bfcache is not in fact busted.

spotman 10y ago

> Today, the only option for ensuring an XHR request is made when the user re-visits a page via the back button is to (1) add an unload handler then (2) use cache busting. I'm sure there is exceptions, but in general, the last thing I want my browser to do when i press back, is to start making requests. I expect the requests to have been already made.

jacquesc 10y ago
The result of this thinking is when I press the back button, I have to refresh the page manually because the data is stale. My daily use case for this is Github Issues. Simple repro: Click an issue, make a change, press back. Now the list view is out of date and doesn't show my changes. So I have to refresh. I think a background XHR request is the best approach (until browsers fix this issue for real). On page load: pull latest from server (if network is down, then no-op). If no changes, then don't change. If there are changes then replace inline without a new page reload.
- daurnimator 10y ago
  No! If I click back I want to see what I saw last time. e.g. I might have seen 3 news articles I was interested in, I click though and read the first one. When I click back I want to see the exact same list as before, and be able to read the next article I saw; not new articles that have been written while I was reading the last one. You can s/news article/github issue/ and my response is the same.
- userbinator 10y ago
  Perhaps the Back button should really be split into Back (cached) and Back (reload), since both of those are equally valid use cases. (Edit: the fact that the parent comment and another sibling comment here currently completely disagree is evidence enough that both options are necessary. I personally want both behaviours, depending on the situation.) No doubt the "UX experts" will complain that it's too complicated for "average users", but we aren't and don't want to be "average users" --- we want a powerful browser UI that lets us control our browsing experience better; that's something that seems to be rare in this age of increasingly dumbed-down UIs.

gayprogrammer 10y ago

This isn't an all-or-nothing issue. The author generalizes that developers and users today use browsers/html differently than they did before, but what I'm hearing is actually a new way to use the word/button for "(go) back". The back button has not changed functionality--it still works as expected on all non-webapp webpages. From my perspective, I think the author should be asking for browsers to implement a new button that follows his desired "load previous URL" behavior.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jimjimjim 10y ago

I generally want a back button that rewinds time (server side be damned). usually I'll right-mouse-button click + open in new tab on any link instead of just clicking on it. Eventually, like garbage collection, I'll stop, go back to the start of the tabs and close a bunch of them, then go back to what i was looking at. And if I'm on a site that doesn't allow right clicking on a link? well the site had better be important otherwise it's gonna get closed.

daurnimator 10y ago
Use middle click (or for those without a middle mouse button on a computer they can't reconfigure, use ctrl/cmd + click)
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  Sometimes middle click gets swallowed by bad code. But more importantly, you can't use either method if the link is a javascript function.
aethertron 10y ago
> I generally want a back button that rewinds time Me too. But not for the browser. For the OS.

jlarocco 10y ago

It's hard to take this seriously because the page itself does not work correctly w.r.t. the back button. For example, if I click through to the http 1.1 spec in the first paragraph, then hit "Back" I see the scrollbar shrink as new content is loaded and uBlock's block count increases as new content loads. If I scroll to the bottom of the page, click a link, and then click back, I don't even go back to the same spot - I'm at the end of the article and content loads below it... My expectation as a user, regardless of the spec, is that I should see exactly what I saw when I was just on the page. Render to a bitmap, and when I click "back" display the bitmap. If going back to the page requires any network requests then the page is doing it wrong. The exception that proves the rule would be streaming content.

ashitlerferad 10y ago

[2013]

Manishearth 10y ago

Note that the behavior described in the post is per spec -- the cache spec is a red herring and doesn't apply here. The web specs override the HTTP spec in various spaces. The relevant spec is at https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/browsers.html#the-session-history-of-browsing-contexts https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/browsers.html#the-ses... Note: > An entry with persisted user state is one that also has user-agent defined state. This specification does not specify what kind of state can be stored. > User agents may discard the Document objects of entries other than the current entry that are not referenced from any script, reloading the pages afresh when the user or script navigates back to such pages. This specification does not specify when user agents should discard Document objects and when they should cache them. and from https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/browsers.html#traverse-the-history https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/browsers.html#travers... > If entry no longer holds a Document object, then navigate the browsing context to entry's URL and > If entry has a different Document object than the current entry, > ... > Make entry's Document object the active document ------ Browsers try to treat the back button as if the user had never left the page. So the XHR requests aren't re-made because the page simply isn't reloaded, it's just made active. The fact that Chrome says "from cache" might be a bug here, but what the devtools show isn't visible to JS/etc, so this isn't a compatibility issue. AFAICT Chrome and Firefox (and presumably Safari) behave the same here, except from a difference in how the bfcache is invalidated. (chrome seems to invalidate when the domain changes). I'm not clear why all of this is a problem though. If the page is reloaded, it's reloaded. If it's loaded from the bfcache, it's as if it was never unloaded (almost the same as the user switching a tab and coming back, except of course JS was suspended). Both behaviors seem ... fine for a webapp?

mixonic 10y ago

Author here, happy this popped up and to see the HN community thinking through it. A few people have brushed off what I sketched as uninteresting and don't see any issues. I'll try to explain it another way (with three years reflection to help). Single page applications are now quite popular. Most single page apps use a different definition of "back" than browsers do, and there are times when the two treatments conflict. Many, or most, use a local in-memory database to keep track of information without going to the server. They update that in-memory store as you make changes. For example you see a list of names: Mary, Robert, John. You click Robert and edit the name to "Rob", the name auto-saves. Then you click "back". Because single-page apps control "back" when in the SPA, they do what most developers want. They return to a semantically correct page, showing Mary, Rob (just edited), John. Tons of apps do this. This is not what the browser does. The browser, if following the "back" specs, would show the out-of-date names of Mary, Robert, and John. The theoretical conflict can also become practical. Think through this flow: * Visit /names * AJAX for GET /api/names * See Mary, Robert, John * Edit Robert's name to Bob, autosave * AJAX for POST /api/name/4 with the new name Bob * See Mary, Bob, John * Click on a link, lets say to Mary's website URL * Mary's website, new domain, loads. * ...click back The SPA loads up, and attempts to GET /api/names. However, the bfcache is at play since the native "back" behavior is running. So the stale API response, with the original names Mary, Robert, John is returned. The list of names on the screen is DIFFERENT than what the user saw after they edited. Additionally most SPA apps presume AJAX calls return accurate data, however here the names are not the names currently in the database. They are only in the bfcache. You can imagine, with more complex data, ways this can cause complex and unforeseen failures. This is a very poorly understood corner of JavaScript development even today. [edit]: formatting

Dylan16807 10y ago
What you describe does not sound like bfcache behavior. Bfcache should make it like you never clicked the link, and create no requests. Did you test this? Is something broken? Separately, do browsers currently return expired data to AJAX calls? Which ones?
- mixonic 10y ago

rob74 10y ago

bendmebackmeanywayyouwantme? That rang a bell... but according to http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/garbage/ithinkimparanoid.html http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/garbage/ithinkimparanoid.html it should actually be bendmebreakmeanywayyouneedme ;)