6 ms·

Use the native back button (if on Android) instead of Twitter's back button. It's been like that since a long time.

reificator 8y ago
Chrome 73 on Windows 10, the site is definitely hijacking the browser's back button. Spamming it works, but a single press is not enough to get away from Twitter. Worth investigating whether this is due to a redirect, or whether it's due to misusing the history API. Either way, it feels very user-hostile.
- radford-neal 7y ago
  Can anyone explain why browsers allow this? Surely it's not technically hard to make "back" actually go back. Is there some downside to letting users control their own screen that I'm not aware of?
  - aikah 7y ago
    I imagine that Twitter is abusing the HTML5 history API. It's a Web specification. It can be useful when used right, but any scriptable functionality is open for abuse.
    - radford-neal 7y ago
      I'm not up on HTML5 APIs. But I do know that it is entirely possible for a browser to have a button labelled "back" that goes back. Always. Why don't they have it? Fear that something horrible will happen on some web page that relies on the user not exiting the page without control going throw their code? But such a web page is broken in any case, since the user might simply lose their internet connection...
      - int_19h 7y ago
        Consider a single-page web app - what does "back" mean in that context? Only the app really knows, the browser doesn't have enough knowledge about its logical UI flow to figure that out. Hence why the history API was introduced, so that app can change parts of the page, and then manually record that change in the browser history in a way that allows for it to be reverted. In practice, it was a problem ever since AJAX first became a thing - with the symptom usually being that "back" didn't do what the users expected, e.g. navigated away from the website, rather than back to the previous page state on that website. Hence why it's one of the earlier HTML5 additions. It's been around for 9 years now, and heavily used all around.
        radford-neal 7y ago
        I think users want a "back" button that goes back to where they were before they visited this web page. The browser knows how to do this. It doesn't need to know anything about the app running on that web page. If the app on that web page wants a button that undoes some state change on that web page, they can create one of their own. It seems like a bad idea to confuse these two very different actions. I don't think it's beyond the capacity of users to understand the distinction if it were actually made consistently.
        int_19h 7y ago
        Most pages these days are like web apps in that they do partial refreshes rather than navigating to a completely new page (with most of the same markup) as you click around. From user's perspective, this looks like a new page, and logically it is. They don't care about how it is actually achieved. For example, on GitHub, when you're browsing some source repo, and you open a folder there, do you expect the Back button to go to the previous folder, or to leave GitHub altogether?
        radford-neal 7y ago
        Well, I"m arguing that combining two functions in one button is a bad idea. I expect there to be a button to leave github altogether, and a different button to move back within github.

Chrome 73 on Windows 10, the site is definitely hijacking the browser's back button. Spamming it works, but a single press is not enough to get away from Twitter. Worth investigating whether this is due to a redirect, or whether it's due to misusing the history API. Either way, it feels very user-hostile.

radford-neal 7y ago
Can anyone explain why browsers allow this? Surely it's not technically hard to make "back" actually go back. Is there some downside to letting users control their own screen that I'm not aware of?
- aikah 7y ago
  I imagine that Twitter is abusing the HTML5 history API. It's a Web specification. It can be useful when used right, but any scriptable functionality is open for abuse.
  - radford-neal 7y ago
    I'm not up on HTML5 APIs. But I do know that it is entirely possible for a browser to have a button labelled "back" that goes back. Always. Why don't they have it? Fear that something horrible will happen on some web page that relies on the user not exiting the page without control going throw their code? But such a web page is broken in any case, since the user might simply lose their internet connection...
    - int_19h 7y ago
      Consider a single-page web app - what does "back" mean in that context? Only the app really knows, the browser doesn't have enough knowledge about its logical UI flow to figure that out. Hence why the history API was introduced, so that app can change parts of the page, and then manually record that change in the browser history in a way that allows for it to be reverted. In practice, it was a problem ever since AJAX first became a thing - with the symptom usually being that "back" didn't do what the users expected, e.g. navigated away from the website, rather than back to the previous page state on that website. Hence why it's one of the earlier HTML5 additions. It's been around for 9 years now, and heavily used all around.
      - radford-neal 7y ago
        I think users want a "back" button that goes back to where they were before they visited this web page. The browser knows how to do this. It doesn't need to know anything about the app running on that web page. If the app on that web page wants a button that undoes some state change on that web page, they can create one of their own. It seems like a bad idea to confuse these two very different actions. I don't think it's beyond the capacity of users to understand the distinction if it were actually made consistently.
        int_19h 7y ago
        Most pages these days are like web apps in that they do partial refreshes rather than navigating to a completely new page (with most of the same markup) as you click around. From user's perspective, this looks like a new page, and logically it is. They don't care about how it is actually achieved. For example, on GitHub, when you're browsing some source repo, and you open a folder there, do you expect the Back button to go to the previous folder, or to leave GitHub altogether?
        radford-neal 7y ago
        Well, I"m arguing that combining two functions in one button is a bad idea. I expect there to be a button to leave github altogether, and a different button to move back within github.