> You get a link from LinkedIn [or such]. 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, […] I've taken to opening anything in a new tab. Closing the tab is my new back button. In an idea world I shouldn't have to, of course, but we live in a world full of disks implementing dark patterns so not an ideal one. Opening in…
This is the way. People think I am eccentric for the number of tabs I keep open.
I am eccentric, née properly insane, which is part of why I have so many tabs left open over my various devices. Sometimes a browser crash that loses some or all that context is a benefit!
Easy 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.
> Draw your own app-level back button top left of page. This is the worst idea I’ve heard all day.
I agree. Because most SPAs don't need a back button. VS Code doesn't have one (undo is not back). Thunderbird doesn't. My MP3 player doesn't.
This relates to Chrome, not to search. In regard to search, they have taken a new direction that I don't think is going to change any time soon. Some time in the last 2 years, they started removing any thing that doesn't get significant natural traffic (ie: have a 30 year old user manual for something odd that people only search for once in a while? -> removed). Last few months, I noticed that they will not index any…
I'm actually surprised when I hear someone technical say they still use Google Search (the search product specifically - they still reign supreme with Maps, etc). I used to love it, but that was quite a long time ago. I personally use Brave Search and perplexity for those very rare instances when brave search doesn't instantly find what I am looking for. Literally the only thing I (rarely) miss from google is super-d…
As I read your comment, I was thinking "Really? Is it that surprising?" Then I remembered you said "someone technical", and no longer am surprised. Although I work with some technical people, I'm also surrounded by fools. Just the other day, I watched someone at work open a new tab to Google search, type "Google" and then click on Google search in the results, bringing them to the same page they had just left. With how quickly they did it, I can only imagine it is muscle memory and they haven't noticed yet that their new tab is Google search, or that this is better somehow.
Probably should have mentioned it, but I was on my phone browser where that option either doesn't exist or isn't surfaced well. A long press on the back button just does the same thing as tapping once, so I'm all out of ideas.
Probably should also mention which phone browser on which phone OS.
Why on earth would I go out of my way to publicise that information in a public forum?
I would like to mention that Google own SPA framework, angular, has redirect routes which effectively do back button hijacking if used, because they add the url you're redirecting from to the history. https://angular.dev/guide/routing/redirecting-routes
getAngular was an online JSON storage service. The guys reused their code when they went to work in DoubleClick at Google. Not made by Google not Google’s framework and plenty of Google people think it’s rubbish.
While that's an interesting history tidbit, angular 2 was remade entirely under Google's leadership - the previous AngularJS framework was not reused to my knowledge - so I'd strongly push back on your statement it not being made by Google
getAngular was an online JSON storage service. The guys reused their code when they went to work in DoubleClick at Google. Not made by Google not Google’s framework and plenty of Google people think it’s rubbish.
While that's an interesting history tidbit, angular 2 was remade entirely under Google's leadership - the previous AngularJS framework was not reused to my knowledge - so I'd strongly push back on your statement it not being made by Google
"made by Google" was added by the 2 guys from the failed startup when Angular was first released (before Angular 2), without permission from the rest of Google.
If the page is lazy loading content then the local ctrl+f is not going to work, obviously. If you’re hinting at an argument about whether lazy loading content should exist, that’s a separate discussion. In my experience, pages that override ctrl+f do it for a good reason
I think I've seen one page override ctrl-f for good reason -- it was a page that lazy loaded literally millions of lines of text that wouldn't have fit into RAM. Every single other page that does it just wastes my time. It's always a super janky slow implementation that somehow additionally fails to actually search through all the text on the page.
then instead of lazy loading load chunks and paginate it like we used to
Did you use the web back in 1995? It was fun, but it also sucked compared to what we have now. Nothing is ever perfect, but I wouldn’t want to go back.
I’d go back in a heartbeat. Making the web a software SDK was the worst thing to happen to it.
People seem to think it was better becausee the technology was simpler. Except the “problem” in question is entirely about popularity, once the internet became pretty much an essential service of the common household it also became the new target for profit-seeking enterprises.
Nothing to do with the technology, everything to do with the people. When you say you want to “go back to the good old days” what you’re actually saying is “I want fewer people to have access to the internet”.