Took long enough. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see them say how invested they are in tackling this. Promoting a rule is one thing, but everything SEO related becomes a cat and mouse game. I don’t have high confidence that this will work.
A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
61–70 of 532 posts
Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the navigation simulates what would happen if we follow links to SPA#pos1, SPA#pos2, etc so that if I do two clicks within the SPA, and then hit Back three times I'm back to whatever link I followed to get to the SPA, I guess it's OK and follows user expectations. But if it is used as an excuse to trap the user in the SPA unless they kill the tab, not OK.
Of course, but programmatically, how do you enforce that?
Some browser APIs (such as playing video) are locked behind a user interaction. Do the same for the history API: make it so you can't add any items to history until the user clicks a link, and then you can only add one.
That's not perfect, and it could still be abused, but it might prevent the most common abuses.
EDIT: apparently Chrome tried that and it wasn't sufficient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47761349
Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
#63>We believe that the user experience comes first I’ll believe that when YouTube gives me the ability to block certain channels versus “not interested” and “don’t recommend channel” buttons that do absolutely nothing close to what I want. Or a thousand other things, but that one in particular has been top of mind recently.
Or if they ever bring back the "ignore this domain" feature so we can ignore ai slop and copycat sites.
It's why I went to Kagi.
Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
#64Google should actually fix this from the browser side instead of trying to seriously punish potentially buggy sites.
We tried a few times. We got as far as gating the ability to push into the "real history stack" [1] behind a user activation (e.g. click). But, it's easy to get the user to click somewhere: just throw up a cookie banner or an "expand to see full article" or similar. We weren't really able to figure out any technical solution beyond this. It would rely on some sort of classification of clicks as leading to "real" same…
The back button itself feels overloaded. There's "go to previous state" and then there's "go to previous origin." In an ideal world when I doubleclick on the back button what I mean is: "get me off of this site, now."
Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
#65Ironically, we have an infringing website right now on the front-page of HN (nypost).
Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
#66The iron law of web encrapification: every web feature will (if possible) be employed to abuse the user, usually to push advertising.
I cannot even reliably press [Space] any more to page down through sites that are meant to be all about content!
One more for the spacebar to advance the page. Have never encountered a broken site (so far). Fingers crossed.
Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
#67Easy fix:
JS doesn't let you change back button behaviour.
Q. But what about SPA?
A. Draw your own app-level back button top left of page.
Another solution: make it a permisson.
Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
#68Google should actually fix this from the browser side instead of trying to seriously punish potentially buggy sites.
Honestly if your site is buggy in a way that effectively breaks the browser, maybe you should be punished.
I recommend 14 days in jail for the site owner, and, if egregarious, the engineer as well.
Not life ruining but just enough to be annoying. Just like their website.
Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about all the very legitimate uses of programmatically adding history entries?
Please explain the legitimate uses. Not once I have ever encountered a website that does something useful by modifying the behavior of my browsing history.
Any single page application, such as YouTube, Gmail, or discord.
It lets persistent content (videos) or connections (chat) persist while emulating a pagenated browsing experience.
When it's done right you don't notice it at all.
Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
#70>We believe that the user experience comes first I’ll believe that when YouTube gives me the ability to block certain channels versus “not interested” and “don’t recommend channel” buttons that do absolutely nothing close to what I want. Or a thousand other things, but that one in particular has been top of mind recently.
Let me permanently hide "shorts".