Long considered malicious website behavior (and defined as abusive by Google), back button hijack is starting to rear its ugly head again. The lower panel in the image is what tomshardware.com displays when the back button is selected. The enshittification continues.

  • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    5 minutes ago

    Tom’s Hardware used to be one of my primary destinations on the web, but it has really fallen off. I’ll bet I’ve been there at most twice in the last year.

  • SpikesOtherDog@ani.socialEnglish
    5·
    1 hour ago

    I tried to recreate this in Firefox, but also couldn’t duplicate it.

    It’s possible they are trying it out, but I’m also concerned you might have a browser highjacker. Do the links go back to Tom’s Hardware, or do they lead somewhere else?

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    13·
    2 hours ago

    This appears to be the page in question:

    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-desktop-environment-face-off

    It doesn’t appear to do so for me on either desktop or mobile, but it might be that I’m using Firefox or some add-on or configuration setting that I’ve set.

    tries Chromium, without add-ons

    Doesn’t seem to do it for me there either.

    EDIT: Also tried navigating across pages on the site in case the mechanism depends on both the first and second page being on the site. I dunno how web devs go about that.

    Dunno. Might be that there’s some way of blocking that behavior if you don’t like it, though, if I’m not seeing it.

    • pivot_root@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      28 minutes ago

      Might be that there’s some way of blocking that behavior if you don’t like it, though, if I’m not seeing it.

      Not without either breaking most SPAs (Single-Page Applications) or writing userscripts with site-specific logic.

      The classic way of doing this crap was to make a placeholder page navigate to the article page. That leaves the redirect page in the history stack so when the user presses the back button, it just opens the page that navigates them forward again.

      The modern way is to use the history API with history.pushState to add a history entry while listening for the popState event to check if the user pressed the back button. Unfortunately, both of those features have a legitimate use case for enabling navigation within a SPA. Writing an extension to replace them with no-ops would, in the best case, break page history in SPA websites. In the worst case, it would break page routing entirely.

      You might be able to get away with conditionally no-oping their functionality based on heuristics such as “only allow pushState if the user interacted with the page in the last 5 seconds,” but it would still end up breaking some websites.

      • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        8 minutes ago

        Honestly though, as both a developer and a user SPAs could get fucked for all I care. I don’t think it’s a requirement of SPAs, but they seem to do so much unnecessary bullshit. So many bad development practices. I don’t hate the concept of SPAs, but it’s clearly just asking too much of the average contract developer.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      212·
      1 hour ago

      The biggest problem with the Doctrow shit where you “coin a term” is it inevitably leads to confusion when it becomes widespread.

      OP doesn’t understand any of this, they just heard “enahitification” and that people up ote it. So when they get confused, they call it that and share it for the likes.

      New people see the misuse, and have no idea what the word is even supposed to mean.

      What OP is complaining about doesn’t make sense and is nonreproducible, but their brain jumps to “enshitification” first because brains are lazy

      • spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
        64·
        49 minutes ago

        The biggest problem with posting anything on Lemmy is that there’s always someone on the Post Prevention Brigade who thinks every other person is an idiot.

  • FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websiteEnglish
    41·
    1 hour ago

    … back button hijack is starting to rear its ugly head again.

    Are you basing this statement on this alleged case alone? I don’t get any of this behavior on this page on Vivaldi. Another person has done more of a deep dive and also came up short.

    • spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      41·
      33 minutes ago

      Im basing it on months of irritation with their BS. Shows up often on Firefox with Ublock. Glad you’re not seeing it on your browser.

      • Davel23@fedia.io
        1·
        1 hour ago

        I’m on Firefox with Ublock Origin, the back button is working fine for me on Tom’s Hardware. Can you provide a specific page on which the issue occurs for you?