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A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

developers.google.com

281–290 of 532 posts

Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

#281
> We believe that the user experience comes first

Bold coming from the company who gives me the most confusing “Open in app” prompts that are designed to confuse you and get you to use their app rather than the web

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/03/29/those-obnoxious-sign-in-w...

Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

#282
post #269
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[fn]+[up arrow] = pgup, [fn]+[down arrow] = pgdown, [fn]+[left arrow] = home, [fn]+[right arrow] = end

These are impossible to press with just one hand (or the bottom of my coffee cup in a pinch), though.

I use option + up arrow or option + down arrow sometimes, works the same as spacebar to page up / page down.

Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

#283

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 homep…

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.

Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

#284
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all of them are side effects of solutions to very real UX problems that couldn't be solved in any other way. Except they had been solved in other ways and the problem was people insisted on using web technologies to emulate those other technologies even when web technologies didn’t support the same primitives. And they chose that path because it was cheaper than using the correct technologies from the outset. And t…

Having done native and web frontends, they are different. I prefer the capabilities of native frameworks but I prefer the web box model. Sizing stuff is native frameworks is nice until it isn’t.

I’ve done both too. And I honestly don’t like the box model.

But I will admit I’ve focused more on desktop than mobile app development. And the thing about sizing stuff is it’s a much easier problem for desktop than mobile apps, which are full screen and you have a multitude of screen sizes and orientations.

Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

#285
post #275

Thank you! One of the worst is TikTok, even as a developer, when someone sends me a TikTok link and I have to visit it, I get stuck in the browser (same with the app but I uninstalled it), and it feels almost device-breaking the way they trap you in.

TikTok is actually very adamant to boot me out of the browser

Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

#286
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>it completely solves the issue on any site

It doesn't solve the problem with Instagram links, which in my experience do the following:

1) Open a new browser tab, with no history. 2) Close the original tab, so I can't easily get back to where I was.

Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

#289
post #279

As usual, it's a good first step but doesn't go far enough. I don't want my back-button hijacked by _anything_. My issue with back-button hijacking isn't even spam/ads (I use an ad-blocker so I don't see those), but sites that do a "are you sure you want to leave? You haven't even subscribed to our newsletter yet?!"

On the other hand, "are you sure you want to exit without saving" is a good use-case. But I'd prefer that to be a setting I can allow for specific site.

Better yet, just save. Storage is cheap and fast these days. The “do you want to save?” idiom is a leftover from the days when a moderately sized document would take a noticeable amount of time to save and eat up a decent chunk of your floppy disk.

Re: A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

#290

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 homep…

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.
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