A new spam policy for "back button hijacking"

CableNinja

Frustrating it took this long for something to be done about this, but glad its now got something being done.

al_borland

Some Microsoft sites have been very guilty of this. They are the ones that stick in my head in recent memory.

musicale

The iron law of web encrapification: every web feature will (if possible) be employed to abuse the user, usually to push advertising.

bschwindHN

Cool, now maybe let's do something about all the shit I have to clear out out my face before I can read a simple web page. For example, on this very article I had to click "No thanks" for cookies and then "No thanks" for a survey or something. And then there was an ad at the top for some app that I also closed. 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).

synack

Are they considering all uses of window.history.pushState to be hijacking? If so, why not remove that function from Chrome?

tgsovlerkhgsel

Now do paywalls next.

charcircuit

Google should actually fix this from the browser side instead of trying to seriously punish potentially buggy sites.

twism

Reddit! I'm looking at you?

mlmonkey

But the question is: why are sites allowed to hijack the Back Button?!?

transcriptase

>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.

incognito124

Now, if they only declared scroll hijacking as spam...

andreareina

> Notably, some instances of back button hijacking may originate from the site's ... advertising platform I feel like anything loaded from a third party domain shouldn't be allowed to fiddle with the history stack.

hysan

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.

psidium

Ironically, we have an infringing website right now on the front-page of HN (nypost).

dnnddidiej

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.

sublinear

> Notably, some instances of back button hijacking may originate from the site's included libraries or advertising platform. We encourage site owners to thoroughly review their technical implementation ... Hah. In my time working with marketing teams this is highly unlikely to happen. They're allergic to code and they far outnumber everyone else in this space. 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.

monegator

Phew. for a moment there i thought they would start blocking alternate uses of the back button in apps (for like when it means "go back" and when it means "close everything") That would have severely rustled my jimmies

p4bl0

That's cool if they can make it work. 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.

kstenerud

Now if only they'd do this for Android apps that hijack the back button to pop up things, or say "are you sure you want to leave?"

oliwarner

Now do the Amazon app. Number of times I've looked for something on my phone, gone through to a product page on Amazon but then have had to back out multiple times to get back to the search listing. Sometimes it's previously viewed products, sometimes it's "just" the Amazon home page. It should be one-and-done.