Modals can be a life saver, if you do server side rendered pages, because navigating back is probably slower than opening/closing a popover via Javascript. You

Modals can be a life saver, if you do server side rendered pages, because navigating back is probably slower than opening/closing a popover via Javascript. You may also lose some state on the previous view on navigating back, you may end up at another scrolling position (I know this can be prevented). I prefer master-detail views. Like an Email client, where you select a message in a list and then see the body of the email. For smartphone sized screens this should switch to a detail page with a back button. Like the Mail app on iPhone/iPad. Master-detail can be tough on server side rendered pages though. And you really need a good page structure, because you show a lot of data on one page and it can look cluttered quickly.