I'm reading the opposite: "If you're currently using any script or technique that inserts or replaces deceptive or manipulative pages into a user's browser history that [...]"
Both in terms of comprehensiveness and in terms of functionality.
If you put 2026 media players (with modern bandwidth), on the manually curated small-editorial web of ‘95 it’d be amazing.
We used to have desktop apps, these SPA JS monstrosities are the result of MS missing the web then MS missing mobile. Instead of a desktop monopoly where ActiveX could pop up (providing better app experiences in many cases than one would think), we have cross-platform electron monstrosities and fat react apps that suck, are slow, and omfgbbq do they break. And suck. And eat up resources. Copy and paste breaks, scrolling breaks, nav gets hijacked, dark mode overridden.
Netflix, Spotify, MS have apps I see breaking on the regular on prime mainstream hardware. My modern gaming windows laptop, extra juicy GPU for all the LLM and local kubernetes admin, chokes on windows rendering. Windows isn’t just regressing, their entire stack is actively rotting, and all behind fancy web buttons.
Old man yelling at cloud, but: geeeez boys, I want to go back.
I'm still not over the loss of Gopher.
It's like walking into some room and having to swat away a bunch of cobwebs before doing whatever it is you want to do (read some text, basically).
zero cookie banners
zero surveys popping up
zero ads to be closed
Just the text of the page with no other distractions in the way.
But thinking of this at this moment, this could be a good use for a locally ran LLM, to get rid of all this crap dynamically. I wonder why Firefox didn't use this as a usecase when they bolted AI on top of Firefox. Maybe it is time for me to check what api FF has for this
It would finally put some teeth behind the myth of the informed consumer, and there would be gloriously absurd court-battles from corporations. ("Freedom of speech and commerce is essential, if people don't like what we're doing they can vote with their wallets... NOT LIKE THAT!")
Clicking the dismiss button on the cookie banner is not a reason to push a state that will show the user a screen full of ads when they try to leave. (Mentioning the cookie banner because AFAIK Chrome requires a "user gesture" before pushState works normally, https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/T8d4_...)
These sites likely pushState on consent actions so it appears like any user interaction.
But I am also willing to pay for valuable content an exorbitant amount if it is valuable enough. For instance, for absolutely critical information I might pay 0.79€ a month.
Not life ruining but just enough to be annoying. Just like their website.
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-document navigations or not.
This can be done reasonably well as long as you're in a cooperative relationship with the website. For example, if you're trying to classify whether a click should emit single-page navigation performance entries for web performance measurement. (See [2].) In such a case, if the browser can get to (say) 99% accuracy by default with good heuristics and provide site owners with guidance on how to annotate or tweak their code for the remaining 1%, you're in good shape.
But if you're in an adversarial relationship with the website, i.e. it's some malicious spammer trying to hijack the back button, then the malicious site will just always go down the 1% path that slips through the browser's heuristics. And you can try playing whack-a-mole with certain code patterns, but it just never ends, and isn't a great use of engineering resources, and is likely to start degrading the experience of well-behaved sites by accident.
So, policy-based solutions make sense to me here.
[1]: "real history stack": by this I mean the user-visible one that is traversed by the browser's back button UI. This is distinct from the programmer-visible one in `navigation.entries()`, traversed by `navigation.back()` or `history.back()`. The browser's back button is explicitly allowed to skip over programmer-visible entries. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/speculative-loading.h...
[2]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/soft-navigati...
Makes it impossible to browse around and long click to open on a new tab doesn’t solve the issue either.
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
The real answer is to have desktop applications that work like applications (buttons do what feels right), and websites that work like websites.
SPA, is a page application. Pages aren’t applications, applications aren’t pages. AutoCAD is an app, the Robotech Encyclopedia is content.
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.
It's why I went to Kagi.
I feel like anything loaded from a third party domain shouldn't be allowed to fiddle with the history stack.
It will become harder for advertisers to deny responsibility for ads that violate their stated policies if they have to submit the ads ahead of time. Also site operators will need a certain level of technical competence to do this.
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.
This is the worst idea I’ve heard all day.
Hah. In my time working with marketing teams this is highly unlikely to happen. They're allergic to code and they far outnumber the majority of honest web devs producing good SEO. Their best practices become the standard for everyone else that's uninitiated.
What they will probably do is change that vanity URL showing up on the SERP to point to a landing page that meets the requirements. This page will have the link the user wants. It will be dressed up to be as irresistible as possible. This will become the new best practice in the docs for all SEO-related tools. Hell, even google themselves might eventually put that in their docs too.
In other words, the user must now click twice to find the page with the back button hijacking.
This just sounds like another layer of yet more frustration. Contrary to popular belief, the user will put up with a lot of additional friction if they think they're going somewhere good. This is just an extra click. Most users probably won't even notice the change. If anything there will be propaganda aimed at aspiring web devs and power users telling them to get mad at google for "requiring" landing pages.
That would have severely rustled my jimmies
I don't understand how Google's indexing work anymore. I've had some website very well indexed for years and years which suddenly disappeared from the index with no explanation, even on the Search Console ("visited, not indexed"). Simple blog entries, lightweight pages, no JavaScript, no ads, no bad practices, https enabled, informative content that is linked from elsewhere including well indexed websites (some entries even performed well on Reddit). At the same time, for the past few years I've found Google search to be a less and less reliable tool because the results are less often what I need.
Anyway, let's hope this new policy can improve things a little.
CableNinja•2h ago
throwaway81523•1h ago
It seems pretty stupid. Instead of expanding the SEO policy bureaucracy to address a situation where a spammer hijacks the back button, the browser should have been designed in the first place to never allow that hijacking to happen. Second best approach is modify it now. While they're at it, they should also make it impossible to hijack the mode one.... oh yes, Google itself does that.
spankalee•1h ago
jack1243star•37m ago
venussnatch•17m ago
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.